Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I War as law enforcement (to 1600)
- PART II New forces stirring (1600–1815)
- 3 War in due form
- 4 Dissension in the ranks
- PART III War as state policy (1815–1919)
- PART IV Just wars reborn (1919–)
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Table of cases
- Table of treaties
- Index
4 - Dissension in the ranks
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I War as law enforcement (to 1600)
- PART II New forces stirring (1600–1815)
- 3 War in due form
- 4 Dissension in the ranks
- PART III War as state policy (1815–1919)
- PART IV Just wars reborn (1919–)
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Table of cases
- Table of treaties
- Index
Summary
[T]he state of men without civil society (which state we may properly call the state of nature) is nothing else but a mere war of all against all; and in that war all men have equal right unto all things.
Thomas Hobbes[T]he belligerents at the outset made an agreement to rest their case with the fortune of battle. [T]his is understood to be the case … when the revenge for their injuries and the securing of their claims … are left to the arbitrament of Mars, and both sides enter the conflict with the thought: ‘Either I will revenge my right or injury in war, or else I will lose still more.’
Samuel PufendorfUntil about the middle of the seventeenth century, Western European legal writing on the subject of war essentially grew out of a unitary tradition, stemming from the medieval just-war framework, with its roots in natural-law thought. Even when, during the seventeenth century, the voluntary law was brought in, the natural law remained as the base, with the voluntary law as a sort of superstructure. The seventeenth century, however, also witnessed the emergence of two dissident strains of legal thought as challenges to the mainstream tradition. One of them will be labelled the ‘Hobbesian’ school after its principal architect, the English political theorist Thomas Hobbes. At its heart was a view of natural law that was radically at odds with its medieval forebear.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- War and the Law of NationsA General History, pp. 131 - 158Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005