ABSTRACT
Once upon a time, political philosophy and international legal studies were but one. In our time, international legal scholars attend very little to political philosophy, political philosophers even less to international law. Professor Nardin is one of a small contingent of younger scholars in the US whose interests in international law coexist with a predilection for “blurred genres” of discourse. The book under review is undoubtedly the most substantial effort yet by a member of this intrepid band to permeate the sclerotic tissues
decisively to Nardin’s style of discourse, the latter providing familiar but intractable puzzles for philosophical inspection: Is there an international society? What is the specific character of international law? How are international law and morality related? The book’s methodical approach and substantive concerns are well captured in these lines from the preface:
I want to defend the view that the practices of international law and international morality constitute indispensable foundations of all durable international association. To the extent that the relations of states achieve a significant degree of permanence, rising above the level of mere episodes in the separate histories of isolated political communities, they must be understood as taking place on the basis of common, authoritative practices and rules. And this, I shall argue, means that they must be understood as occurring within a world of legal and moral ideas (p. ix).
