Hugo Grotius, Google Translate, and Some Others: Issues Regarding Money Loans

Relying on Hugo Grotius's analysis of money lending, this paper aims to illustrate the reasons why, though unanimously praised as a philosopher and a lawyer, his recognition for his contribution to the shaping of economic ideas is far from assured. An investigation of several translations and re-editions of Grotius's De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625) shows that, when they deal with the different types of loan contract, they favour variants of a functional, rather than structural, distinction between them – which makes it possible to identify what remains in the hands of the lender as the object of the disagreement between Grotius and the earlier scholastic approach. It is then shown that this disagreement concerned the nature of usufruct and property during a money loan. Grotius borrowed from the Digest the idea of an expanded usufruct, the price of which can be interpreted as the interest paid to the lender. This called for a reconsideration of what property right was all about. Such a reconsideration leads us to see in a property right derived from the very possibility of contracting through a mutuum the source of the expanded usufruct. However, this was not made explicit in the De Jure, but in an earlier commentary by Grotius on Luke 6:35, mentioned by Barbeyrac in a footnote to his 1724 translation, but which disappeared from most later translations and editions. Insofar as economic issues are concerned, the identification today of Grotius's contribution is still dependent on various editions of the 18th and 19th centuries, i.e. of their translation and editorial biases.