ABSTRACT
This chapter lists some of the main inquiries that are subsumed under the positivist and naturalist theories about the source of law. It shows how the reification involved in the way the question was posed has limited, warped and frustrated both sets of theoretical efforts. Positivism is, or was until recently, the dominant school of jurisprudential thought in international law. The main "opposition" to positivist international legal scholarship has always come from the proponents of natural law. Positivists asserted that the normative force of international law came from the fact that the sovereign had consented to it. The chapter also shows how Western "analytic" or "formal" juris-prudes produced exactly the same kind of arguments as the contemporary "ideological" theorists they have excoriated for being partisan. The strange thing about complex and contradictory yearnings is that the very language in which they are expressed tends both to exacerbate them and to deny us the possibility of ever dealing with them.
