Putting Nature and Nations Asunder 167In certain respects, Hobbes’s work represented a frontal attack on the
natural-law tradition in general, including that of Grotius (even though
Hobbes never troubled to deal with Grotius’s writing in any detail). But in
other respects, that is not so. For Hobbes certainly did not question the ex-
istence of natural law as such. He did, however, put forward a radically un-
orthodox view of its contents. In addition, he departed from previously ac-
cepted wisdom by rejecting natural law’s important companion doctrine:
the innate sociability of the human species. It has been observed that this
belief had been closely connected to natural law throughout the Middle
Ages— although it was, at the same time, conceptually distinct from it.
Hobbes was the fi rst major writer to eff ect a clean breach between the two.
In place of the Aristotelian principle of innate human sociability, Hobbes
substituted a picture of the human race that was derived from a theory of
individual human psychology in which the rational pursuit of self- interest
in general, and of security in par tic u lar, was the central value. Where tradi-
tional natural- law thought regarded the state of nature as Edenic, without
confl ict, Hobbes saw it as a veritable cauldron of competitiveness and tur-
moil. He regarded human life, in short, as fundamentally asocial, with each
individual left to survive as best he or she was able in the face of constant
threats to that survival and of constant competition for key resources. Life
in this state of nature was all too likely to be, in Hobbes’s notorious phrase,
“sol ita r y, poor, na st y, br ut ish, a nd shor t.” Some have regarded this as a
cynical and hopelessly reductionist image of human nature— with Hobbes
as an all too worthy successor of Machiavelli. Others have hailed his writing
as a welcome breath of realism and as the birth of a new po liti cal philosophy
rooted in the rights of individuals.
Fortunately, it is not necessary, for present purposes, to take sides in this
still lively debate. It suffi ces to note the drastic change that Hobbes’s views
entailed in natural- law thought— and, indirectly, the impact on international
legal ideas that fl owed from it. Hobbes’s version of natural law was, in com-
parison with that of Aquinas and his followers (including Grotius), ruthlessly
stripped down. Although he set out no fewer than nineteen laws of nature,
just two of them were of universal and fundamental importance. One of
these was a right, and the other a duty. Th e fundamental right was personal
security, or survival. Th e fundamental duty was the due per for mance of
agreements.