ABSTRACT
In The Social Contract, Rousseau declares that he has given up the idea of writing about the ‘external relations’ of states. But numerous texts – including a recently discovered work about the Law of War – show that he had thought very seriously about the question of the nature and origin of war and of the possibility of making it subject to the rule of law. Rousseau, against Hobbes, links its appearance to that of sovereign states; the state of war is therefore the necessary result of international relations. Moreover, he considers international law as chimerical. How then can he conceive a non-utopian theory of ‘just war’? My hypothesis is that his conception of the law of war is deduced from principles of internal political law and arises from pragmatic necessity.
