ABSTRACT
This chapter begins the task of setting out the major contributions from legal and political philosophy that inform the current project. The emphasis in this book is on contemporary debate: jurisprudence and related philosophical resources of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However some remarks must first be made on relevant contributions of political philosophers of earlier centuries. Some of the arguments of Hobbes and Locke in the seventeenth century, and of Rousseau, Hume and Kant in the eighteenth, are of sufficient significance for the current project that overviews of their arguments should be included. These earlier contributions are the work of social and political philosophers rather than of international lawyers, or of scholars of international law, as such, although such distinctions are not always applicable.
