THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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opinion, which in many aspects was still class­bound, still represented the private interests of the republican aristocracy in Holland. But theoretically Grotius definitely
seeks generally­correct reason in commands and prohibitions, the ‘recta ratio’, as he says with Cicero. In his interpretation of the ‘oecumene’ of his Natural Right,
which was equally valid for all men, he clearly followed the Stoics. They had, after all, first portrayed Natural Right as being the same at all times and in all nations,
beyond human arbitrariness, beyond changing opinions and beyond interests (which shaped positive law). Grotius takes up the Stoic doctrine of the consensus gentium,
as an empirical proof of Natural Right, and the doctrine of the communes notiones, which only have to be brought to scientific consciousness, as a priori notions. The
agreement in the certainty of what is right is thus founded in the nature of reason, in the reason of nature as the causa universalis (l.c., Proleg. 40). There is no
dispensation from this rational law which universally prevails, although repeatedly obstructed by particular interests; it is like two times two equals four, and therefore
could not even be changed by God, but would indeed be lex divina even if God did not exist (l.c., Proleg. 71). The strange thing is that the a priori construction did not
even result in quite the opposite when the content of its ‘principle’ was changed. As in the case of Hobbes (De cive, 1642, Leviathan, 1651), the original advocate of
the Royalist party in England, the fiercest champion of absolute central power and yet a — democrat. The basic drive and intention natural to man are now no longer
the appetitus socialis, which is friendly and optimistic, but boundless selfishness, hence homo homini lupus, hence bellum omnium contra omnes as the state of nature.
The same selfishness consequently concludes the state­contract not as one of unification, but of subjugation, of the deliberate suppression of wolfish nature. This nature
is entrusted to one person who keeps it and now only uses it de jure: for oppressing all subjects, for establishing peace and the security which seeks self­preservation,
in accordance with its ‘principle’. There is no law at all outside the state, and within it everything is law that the ruler commands, though in accordance with the
‘principle’ of peace and the security of all — ‘auctoritas, non veritas facit legem’* (Leviathan, cap. 26). Of course democracy emerged here too in the end, even a
more unlimited kind than in the aristocratically class­bound politician Grotius; an awkward democracy certainly, but one which nevertheless caused Charles II to
exclaim of Leviathan: ‘I never read a book which contained so much sedition, treason and impiety.’ If people come together with the intention
* ‘Authority, not truth, makes the law.’