166 Reason and Its Rivals (ca. 1550– 1815)alike by later positivists and natural lawyers. His reputation only seemed to
grow, even as the actual reading of his famous book fell increasingly out of
fashion. Th e early twenty- fi rst century saw him cited as an authority in a
World Court judgment.
Th is extraordinary fame might lead one to think of him as some kind of
Galileo or Newton of international law. But he was nothing of the sort. His
instincts were fi rmly in the past, in the rationalist tradition of natural law
extending back to Aquinas. He would be horrifi ed to be thought of— as he
sometimes is— as a pioneer of later repudiations of natural law. But in this,
too, there is some truth. For the distinction between natural law and the vol-
untary law did turn out to be an important step along the road to the positiv-
ism of the nineteenth century. Grotius would not have dreamed of going
down that path. But he did erect a signpost that others chose to follow.
Th e Hobbesian Challenge
A severe challenge to the international law vision of Suárez and Grotius came
from a younger contemporary of those two: an En glish po liti cal theorist and
general phi los o pher named Th omas Hobbes. Born in 1588, as the Spanish
Armada neared British shores, Hobbes was a self- described “child of fear”— a
sentiment that played a central role in his po liti cal thought. Hobbes is found
on few people’s lists of international lawyers, but that is unjust, for he played
an important part in the development of the subject.
Hobbes began his career as a tutor to one of the great noble house holds of
En gland, in which capacity he took his charges on the grand tour of Eu rope
and became acquainted with intellectual circles in early seventeenth- century
Paris. His early writing was on the nature of man, a subject to which he
brought a strongly materialistic approach, duly earning him enemies in or-
thodox theological circles. With the outbreak of civil strife in his home coun-
try aft er 1640, he prudently departed to Paris, this time for an eleven- year
stay. During this period, he served as tutor to the future King Charles II,
then in exile aft er the defeat of the royalist forces in the En glish Civil War.
Hobbes’s principal activity of the Paris period, for present purposes, was the
writing of his best- known work, Leviathan, published in 1651, just prior to
his return to his home country.