The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960: 14 (Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lectures, Series Number 14)

The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960: 14 (Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lectures, Series Number 14)
by Martti Koskenniemi (Author)
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (29 Nov. 2001)
Language: English
Hardcover: 584 pages
ISBN-10: 0521623111
ISBN-13: 9780521623117
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Book Description
International law was born from the impulse to ‘civilize’ late nineteenth-century attitudes towards race and society, argues Martti Koskenniemi in this extensive study of the rise and fall of modern international law. In a work of wide-ranging intellectual scope, now available for the first time in paperback, Koskenniemi traces the emergence of a liberal sensibility relating to international matters in the late nineteenth century, and its subsequent decline after the Second World War. He combines legal analysis, historical and political critique and semi-biographical studies of key figures (including Hans Kelsen, Hersch Lauterpacht, Carl Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau); he also considers the role of crucial institutions (the Institut de droit international, the League of Nations). His discussion of legal and political realism at American law schools ends in a critique of post-1960 ‘instrumentalism’. This book provides a unique reflection on the possibility of critical international law today.