Allott, Philip --- "Foreword" [2011] ELECD 568; in Orakhelashvili, Alexander (ed), "Research Handbook on the Theory and History of International Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Research Handbook on the Theory and History of International Law

Editor(s): Orakhelashvili, Alexander

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848443549

Section Title: Foreword

Author(s): Allott, Philip

Number of pages: 2

Extract:

Foreword


It was unexpected, but inevitable. It was not easy to suppose that the intellectual disci-
pline of International Law would, at last and so readily, recognise the shameful poverty
of its theoretical superstructure. When it happened, it was not surprising, given the
spectacular increase in the volume and density and complexity and diversity of substan-
tive International Law since 1945. Large-scale social phenomena ­ religions, political
systems, economic systems ­ generate the ideas necessary to explain and justify them.
And the ideas become part of the life of the phenomena, each energising the other in their
further development.
Law, as a large-scale social phenomenon, has been in such a mutually creative rela-
tionship with transcendental ideas throughout the whole of recorded human history.
Law, evidently a natural and necessary social phenomenon, has needed an exceptional
volume of socially effective ideas to explain and justify its highly coercive actual power
in given societies. A law governing governments was obviously something less than a
natural or necessary social phenomenon. But, intermittently, the prestige of the word
law was borrowed tentatively, defensively, paradoxically, metaphorically ­ natural law,
the law of nations, international law. But it was out of the question that a law governing
governments might be able simply to appropriate, for its own purposes of explanation
and justification, the vast age-old accumulation of transcendental thinking about the
universal phenomenon of law.
International Law was obviously an anomaly in relation to that perennial and univer-
sal tradition. For some observers, it was ...