ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 focused on important contributions from legal and political philosophy of past centuries to the project of describing international law as the law of collectives. As described there, the diverse traditions in legal and political philosophy that emerged from the time of Hobbes onwards present us with a range of tools and conceptual frameworks for describing legal relationships at the international level. These include examinations of sovereignty, of the legitimacy of various forms of government and of the ways in which the citizenry are to be described and their powers and obligations articulated. Such enquiries had been made since ancient times, and sovereignty had been a lively issue for the medieval scholars such as Bartolus and Baldus. Seventeenth-century analysis of tyranny, for example, built on classical foundations, for Rome had regulated tyranny – at times of emergency, dictatorial leadership was legitimate.However the writings of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau and of their various contemporaries on these continuing topics are recognizably modern in terms of geopolitics. They were composed in the era of contesting kingdoms and emerging republics within Europe and of the accelerating settlement and exploitation by European nations of the ‘New World’ as well as of territories to the East. Relationships between Princes in the sixteenth century were already driven by demands of trade as much as by aspirations of status or the greed for conquest. The profession of diplomacy already had many of its familiar, contemporary characteristics (Kissinger 1994; Wright2006). Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau: all had experience of working in the diplomatic service, broadly defined (Damrosch 2007: 168, 424). That said, the previous chapter discussed relevant lines of thinking in legal and political philosophers for most of whom international law was a secondary or indirect concern. In the present chapter a focus on international law is adopted, still in a historical context. This will assist in clarifying the lineaments of the collective project, both within and outwith international law as a discipline, before going on in the chapters that follow to consider some topics in greater depth and with a more contemporary focus.
