“Subjective and objective notions of law are locked in a struggle over contemporary jurisprudence. The theory of international law, in particular, vacillates back and forth uncertainly between the antipodes of a state-individualistic and a human-universalistic perspective, between the subjectivism of the primacy of the legal order of the state and the objectivism of the primacy of international law… And yet, it is on a sure path toward an objectivistic conception of law.” This programmatic statement by Hans Kelsen from 1920 leads directly to the core of the Vienna School's theory of international law: creating a scientific foundation for an “objective” international law. From Kelsen's perspective, the primary task of legal scholarship was the theoretical construction of an international law whose validity was disconnected from the sovereign will of the state. To that end, the medium of the law was to be newly conceived as universal law with the help of the “objectivistic” conception of law, that is, one that proceeded from the primacy of international law.

In their striving for a “more objective” and simultaneously methodologically superior construct of international law, Kelsen and his students harked back on important points to intellectual precursors from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – though they developed them further or set themselves emphatically apart from them. The approach I have taken here will place their struggle for an objectivized universal law into the context of the historical discourse.