Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Notes on the contributors
- 1 A jurisprudence of the limit
- PART I Sovereignty otherwise
- 2 Speaking law: on bare theological and cosmopolitan sovereignty
- 3 Law as conversation
- 4 Corporate power and global order
- 5 Seasons in the abyss: reading the void in Cubillo
- PART II Human rights and other values
- PART III The relation to the other
- PART IV History's other actors
- Index
3 - Law as conversation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Notes on the contributors
- 1 A jurisprudence of the limit
- PART I Sovereignty otherwise
- 2 Speaking law: on bare theological and cosmopolitan sovereignty
- 3 Law as conversation
- 4 Corporate power and global order
- 5 Seasons in the abyss: reading the void in Cubillo
- PART II Human rights and other values
- PART III The relation to the other
- PART IV History's other actors
- Index
Summary
Absolutist and sovereign conditions of law
This chapter explores a concept that has been of some importance in international law, and recurs throughout this book, namely that of sovereignty. Is international law, as the Victorian positivists believed, something merely persuasive, law only by analogy, by virtue of its having behind it no sovereign in a state, the sign of whose volition its proper credentials require it to be? Historically, the concept of sovereignty has been closely associated not only with the state, but with the practice of imperial expansion. Indigenous people encountered by marauding Europeans often ordered themselves without the elaborate institutions of sovereign government. As a consequence they entered their conquerors' consciousnesses almost as hostile elements of the landscape, noxious pests to be exterminated. Their visibility to Europeans as a form of authentic humanity depended on assimilation to the habits of their betters.
The failure of British sensitivity to the possibility of social orders based on convention and manners, mutually understood rituals, even taught ways of addressing others so as to avoid giving offence and endangering the peace of the community, seems especially odd. Their own experience of civil disorder in the seventeenth century, a series of clashes of rival certainties concerning religion and political organization, led writers from Locke and Shaftesbury in England, to the Scottish Enlightenment literati, men like Hume and Adam Smith, to search for cultural solutions to the problems of peace and stability.
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- International Law and its Others , pp. 57 - 84Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
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