 The controversial beginning (and eventual locus classicus) of the new approach, which would aspire to rigor and persuasion in morals and politics in the way that Descartes had sought them for science and metaphysics, was Grotius’s “Preliminary Discourse” or “Prolegomena” (§§ 5–8) to On the Right of War and Peace (1625). For there, the Dutch classicist, ambassador, and corporate counsel for the Dutch East India Company challenged the moral relativism advocated by the ancient skeptic, Carneades, by laying out the basic requirements of communal living. Unlike Carneades, his professional concerns were not epistemological argument, moral proof, or philosophical system as such, but rather the concrete mitigation of conflicts and the maintenance of peace. Appealing to a so-called principle of sociality or sociability (conceived as both presupposition and requirement), he sought to identify the most general or minimal, and thus most widely acceptable, rights and laws of human association. These focused mainly, in his own case, on international matters of war and peace, but in other natural lawyers like Pufendorf they addressed the entire range of human affairs. The modernity of the project, as well as its secularism, lay as noted in the intentional avoidance of biblical, theological, and confessional presuppositions, and in the rejection of the essentialism and associated teleology of classical (abstract) realism – which were thought to generate or exacerbate rather than to resolve intellectual and practical controversies (Forbes 1975, Tuck 1979 and 1987, Todescan 2001, Ekardt and Richter 2006, Hunter 2007b). Instead, and in the manner of the physical sciences, the new discipline devised explanations that emulated (somehow) mathematical reasoning and appealed to concrete observation, attempting thereby to create a shared outlook possessing theoretical coherence, empirical plausibility, and pragmatic effect (Röd 1970, Dufour 1980).