Hugo Grotius, Monopolies and the Shift in Business Morality in the Early Modern Low Countries

Abstract

As James Whitman has shown in a groundbreaking article in the The Yale Law Journal, subtle changes in the moral-legal treatment of business practices in the early modern Low Countries may be indicative of a wider tendency to lend normative support to the rise of a modern commercial society. Expanding on this insight, this article shows that with regards to the treatment of the problem of" monopolies", a similar such change occurs. In a passage from his influential work On the Law of War and Peace (1625), Hugo Grotius argued that" not all monopolies are against nature", thereby creating space for a more lenient treatment of chartered companies and dominant positions acquired through commercial industry in comparison to the Roman legal tradition and scholastic morality. Moreover, drawing on Max Weber's intuition about the spiritual sources of Western legal culture, this paper argues that a fresh look at Grotius's moral theological sources, especially Leonardus Lessius's On Justice and Law (1621), may provide us an explanation as to the why this subtle shift in his normative assessment of certain monopolistic practices occurred in the first place.