ABSTRACT

Almost coterminous with the birth of the modern states system have been the development of the many attempts to transcend it. At its conceptual inception in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were many who bitterly opposed it, seeing it as little better than a law of the jungle and a denial of everything they felt Christian Europe stood for. Perhaps the most eloquent, and still among the most interesting, of these figures, as I suggested in the Introduction, is Leibniz.1 However, Leibniz’ affection for the medieval conception of the Respublica Christiana was not the route that disaffection with the states system was increasingly to take in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2