826 I•CON 11 (2013), 818–834 the two books reviewed here. Both are worthwhile reading and, despite considerable differences in their methodology and courses of argumentation, they also share some shortcomings and achievements. While Kleinlein’s approach is driven by the motive to cover every single subject in detail, which makes the book somewhat lengthy, Schwöbel is short and concise, yet at the price of some oversimplification. More importantly, however, both authors deserve credit for their sharp arguments, intellectual approach, and their courage to take a more reflexive point of view on the process of global constitutionalization. Petra Dobner Institute of Political Science, Martin-Luther-University at Halle-Wittenberg Email: [email protected] doi:10.1093/icon/mot030 David Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xii + 300. £17.99. ISBN: 9780521001694. With Foundations of Modern International Thought Harvard historian David Armitage presents the main outcomes of his research in “international intellectual history” he has undertaken since the acclaimed The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, published in 2000. Foundations consists of a collection of essays principally dealing, from the perspective of contextual history, with the international law and relations theories of classical political writers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham. While these authors are mostly remembered for their work on domestic law and politics, Armitage focuses on demonstrating their importance for the history of international thought, thereby rejecting any neat separation between internal and international affairs. The book does not entirely meet the expectations of readers accustomed to the brilliant and coordinated historical narrative of Armitage’s previous writings. While it is a piece of well-argued scholarship and reasserts powerful claims, notably the call for internationalizing and globalizing history, it does not represent a newly designed, sweeping, provoking or methodologically engaging history of the international. Rather, as Armitage himself states in the opening lines, Foundations stands “as a partial record” of the recent developments of international intellectual history and as “an inspiration for international intellectual historians in the future” (p. 1). The word Foundations that stands out in the title should not mislead the reader into comparing Armitage’s book with Quentin Skinner’s wide-ranging work on the history of political thought.1 Armitage himself warns against any such comparison and makes “no implicit claim exhaustively or comprehensively to excavate all the basic elements which went into the making of modern international thought” (p. 8). In the same vein he states that his book “does not attempt to replace earlier narratives with any one point of origin or single continuous, unfolding tradition of discussion” (p. 13). Rather, Armitage submits, without further elaborating, that his central aim is to “question conventional narratives” by means of a “critical” examination of canonical early-modern scholarship (ibid.). That he is not searching for the “beginning” of the international is confirmed by the fact that his exposition of early-modern international thought does not go as far as to make a case for Hobbes, Locke, Burke and Bentham as providers of founding principles of modern international thought. Armitage only proves that some of those writers’ reflections have been relevant, some more some less, for the history of the international. If this is the case, though, it is not clear why the term Foundations had to appear in the title, especially in times in which it is undergoing critical scrutiny by its former users themselves. Talking about Foundations Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols, 1978). 1 Book Reviews today is premised on a specific methodological orientation and conception of history which the reader might have wished to be clarified in the introduction. As indicated by the idea of the Foundations as a “record”, Armitage in the introduction and the first chapter offers a detailed account of the recent trends of international intellectual history, attesting to a broad and increasing interest in the field. Sure, if under international intellectual history one understands a “global” intellectual history, then the current state of research may appear sketchy and disappointing. This ‘global’ history is intended as a truly world history accounting for both particular and general contexts, but, aside from a few exceptions, it still looks like a patchwork of former national histories. It lacks detailed analysis as well as criteria to decide which national historical events or trends are globally relevant.2 The outlook, however, is brighter if international intellectual history is viewed as a narrower, historically contextualized study of early doctrines of the international. This understanding, prevailing in Armitage’s Foundations too, is now recognized as characterizing one of the main areas of historical investigation. As Armitage observes, it has been on the rise at least since the 1990s, as the primacy of foreign policy was re-affirmed in many countries, and a growing number of scholars began to address issues such as globalization, Empire and alleged clashes of civilizations in historical perspective (p. 4). Historians of political thought shifted the focus of their research away from the now provincialized domestic sphere to the promising and multidisciplinary field of the international.3 One of these noteworthy exceptions is Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (2009). 3 Among the leading figures in this move towards international history were Anthony Pagden with Lords of All the World : Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500– c. 1800 (1995) and J. G. A. Pocock, whose work culminated in Barbarism and Religion (5 vols, 1999–2011). 2 827 International intellectual history then functioned as a crossroad where historians met with like-minded international lawyers and international relations theorists, who on their part were taking a historiographical turn to question dogmatic realist and idealist conceptions of the world order. This convergence of history and international law and relations led to an interdisciplinary revival of international intellectual history–a revival that may be regarded as an utterly new birth given the peculiarity of contemporary accounts of the discipline. Instead of providing hagiographies of the founding fathers of international thought as was common in the past, scholars in international intellectual history now tend to dismantle traditional myths and to consider authoritative writings as texts to be interpreted in light of broader discursive practices in which the agency of the author no longer occupies centre stage. Emphasis on historical and linguistic context and critical method has given rise to several cutting-edge works in international intellectual history by scholars such as Richard Tuck, Annabel Brett, Martti Koskenniemi, James Tully and David Armitage himself, among others. Expanding on Armitage’s report on recent scholarship, it may be noted that mounting interest in the history of international thought can be spotted also in editorial trends. A number of new editions of the classics of international thought, especially from the early-modern ius naturae et gentium, are coming out along with translations of seminal secondary sources. This is occurring at a pace unparalleled since the heyday of apologetic international legal history in the early twentieth century, when the series The Classics of International Law started under the auspices of James Brown Scott and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Among recent publications in international intellectual history, mention may be made of Benedict Kingsbury, Benjamin Straumann and David Lupher’s recent translation of Alberico Gentili’s De armis Romanis, or of the forthcoming English version of Emmanuelle Jouannet’s monograph Emer de Vattel et l’émergence du droit international classique. The rising interest and availability of sources in 828 I•CON 11 (2013), 818–834 international intellectual history is further indicated by the increasing number of re-editions of Enlightenment treatises by the Liberty Fund. Meanwhile, the internet allows scholars immediate and free access to thousands of early-modern writings, including less renowned ones. There are, of course, limits to these apparent signs of academic advance in international intellectual history. Only a few relevant works in foreign languages are translated into English and spread beyond national borders. Online consultation, though potentially beneficial, may imply selective and less thorough reading of sources. While older volumes formerly consigned to oblivion on the dusty shelves of a handful of libraries are now readily available on the internet, this is of little help if Western scholars no longer read Latin, and sometimes not even French or German as foreign languages. At present there are several specialists who laudably devote themselves to the study of non-European languages and sources instead, but, comparatively, they do not appear more numerous than the polyglots who filled the ranks of seventeenth or eighteenth century academia. In terms of accessing sources in foreign languages, international intellectual history is less “international” now than it was in the whole of the modern age. This state of affairs runs clearly counter to Armitage’s optimistic vision of the progressive internationalization and globalization of historical research. Both the merits and limits of Armitage’s narrative are best exemplified by the three Lockean essays constituting the main body of the book. Therein, Armitage carries out a painstaking textual analysis based on accurate archival research. He thus expounds Locke’s notorious involvement in the slave trade and in the drafting of the racially discriminating Constitutions of Carolina, which equipped freemen with the right of life and death over their slaves. Armitage’s reconstruction of those facts is precise, but the reader may find problematic the manner in which they are interpreted. For Armitage views Locke’s endorsement of slavery as a purely pragmatic move and denies its being in any way related to Lockean liberal philosophical theory, the latter being non-hierarchical and inclusive (p. 129). Most modern commentators have conversely pictured Locke’s liberal theory as essentially discriminating against those human beings whom he assumed to be lacking rationality, such as slaves and Native Americans.4 Armitage strongly contests this opinion and argues that Locke, while a racist in practice, never really thought of African and American peoples as irrational in the strict sense. Armitage then proceeds to postulate that Locke cannot be labeled as a theorist of “empire” proper insofar as he did not squarely theorise a hierarchy of rationalities and cultures. What emerges here is the question of Europe’s colonial guilt, a question that historians inevitably get entangled in despite any programmatic statements to the contrary. Armitage seems to take a modernist stance on it. He suggests that Locke, and European Enlightenment thinkers more generally, were not responsible for building inherently discriminating theories, but rather (and perhaps “only”?) for not applying liberal and emancipatory theories properly to the rest of the world. If Armitage really pursued this line of argument, his conclusion would be controversial. Whilst Locke occasionally acknowledged the “rationality of the savage” in the name of the purported universality of Reason, it is hard not to see this as a strategy he merely deployed to buttress some of his parochial claims relating to British and European interests. That Locke never truly recognized the “savage” as rational subjects is patent as he did not infer from the “rationality of the savage” any rights, duties or other practical consequences. What is more, rationality alone was not a casting criterion for Locke to establish rights and duties. In his opinion, human beings’ legal status depended For a “colonial” reading of Locke, Armitage for instance refers, at pp. 92 and 114, to James Tully, ‘Rediscovering America: The Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights’, in James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (1993) 137–76; Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (1996). 4 Book Reviews not on the sheer possession of rationality, but on the concrete modes by which they put rationality, quite literally, to work. In Locke’s labour theory of appropriation, which fully vindicated European colonialism, the inferiority of the “savage” precisely lay in their failure to make proper use of God-given rationality.5 This is the core question when it comes down to illustrating, as Armitage wishes, Locke’s attitude towards Empire. There is no point in redirecting attention away from Locke’s clearly pro-imperialist political and legal activity towards the potential egalitarianism of his liberal theory because, as often happens with law and politics, the way principles are applied is more crucial than principles themselves. In successive essays, Armitage leaves aside political theory to contest the domestic/ international dichotomy on other planes, by examining the international operation of domestic institutions and the international function of domestic legal documents. In the piece “Parliament and international law in eighteenth-century Britain”, Armitage deals with the British parliament’s move towards the international through gradual takeover of foreign affairs in the final phases of the First Empire. Such parliamentarization of foreign policy in Britain, he argues, consolidated the peculiar characterization of the law of nations as a part of the law of England, and resulted in substantial transformations in the British approach to international law. This conclusion may be particularly valuable as a framework for further research. It may be helpful, for instance, to contextualize nineteenth century Britain’s leading role in the suppression of international crimes, in particular to grasp British efforts to assimilate slave trade with piracy, and piracy under the law of nations with piracy under English law. Armitage turns to the international impact of domestic official documents in the two final chapters of the book, where he discusses Declarations of Independence, notably those made 5 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, V, 37 (Laslett ed., 1988). 829 on the American continent since 1776. Armitage posits that such texts were not drafted for merely constitutional purposes, to assert the legal and moral principles of nascent polities. More importantly, Declarations of Independence qualified as international statements made by freedom fighters to obtain recognition of a de facto independent state as an international legal subject, and of themselves as legitimate government officials. Recognition in turn enabled the nascent nation to seek military and financial assistance from foreign powers while discouraging intervention in support of reactionary forces. The question of recognition is not novel and has been at the center of endless doctrinal debates in international law, but the historical function of Declarations of Independence has remained underresearched. Armitage’s re-conceptualization of Declarations as speech acts performed on the international stage will hopefully inspire fresh research on the subject. Still, not all Declarations of Independence have targeted an international public. For example, as Armitage himself recalled in his 2007 work The Declaration of Independence: A Global History, the “Haitian declaration of independence [of 1 January 1804] was directed to a domestic audience rather than to the candid world,” in particular to proclaim the end of slavery.6 The declaration came as foreign powers like France, Britain and Spain, far from acting as potential rescuers to be appealed to, were already heavily involved in the Haiti revolution and opposed or interfered with the local struggle for liberty. Later on, France recognized Haiti only after being granted enormous monetary compensations which crushed the Haitian economy in the long term. Meanwhile the neighboring United States, Armitage noted in The Declaration, aggravated Haiti’s position by refusing recognition until 1862 out of fear of spreading slave revolts. Perhaps, Armitage might have briefly mentioned the Haiti case in Foundations as well. This would have been appropriate both to complexify David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007), p. 116. 6 830 I•CON 11 (2013), 818–834 the overall designation of the Declarations of Independence as international documents and to avoid giving the impression that the history of such Declarations is one of “modernity” and progress. Considering the book as a whole, Armitage deserves considerable credit for proposing the exploration of the domestic from the viewpoint of the international as a means to widen the traditional domain of the history of international thought. This may benefit in particular the subfield of international legal history, which, despite a few remarkable exceptions, is still primarily made up of commentaries on the traditional VitoriaGentili-Grotius-Pufendorf-Vattel canon. In this regard, Armitage’s call for broadening the horizon of the history of international thought by a reappraisal of the classics of political theory and of domestically conceived legal and political texts is highly welcome. Yet one might wonder if Armitage’s choice of selecting Hobbes, Locke, Burke and Bentham as the doctrinal nucleus of the Foundations really means broadening the horizon of “international” thought. All of these authors were fellow countrymen giving expression to the concerns of a specific national tradition, the British, and none of them, except for Bentham, were much of cosmopolitans. It is baffling to see that no place in the book is reserved for non-British writers. And even more baffling is that Armitage fails to provide a reason for such return of him to the pattern of national history. Indeed, the current trend–to which he has contributed, for example in The Declaration of Independence–is to look beyond the national towards the pan-European and the global. Had Armitage wished to draw specific attention to British scholarship in Foundations, an explanatory statement would have been appreciated. Also, the reader may query why Hobbes, Locke, Burke and Bentham should be characterized as any more “foundational” authors than other political writers like, say, Machiavelli or Bodin, who had inaugurated a modern and influential concept of the law of nations earlier on. Hobbes, and partly Locke, certainly matched their achievement, but the same cannot be said of Burke and Bentham. This is not to argue that Armitage’s inquiry should have actually covered Machiavelli and Bodin too, since it would have thus turned into one of those old-fashioned grand narratives unacceptable under the aesthetic standard of the age. The point is simply that if Machiavelli or Bodin might well have deserved to occupy Burke’s and Bentham’s places in Armitage’s story, and if Armitage nowhere in the book takes the trouble to justify why writers like Burke and Bentham may be regarded as “foundational”, then it may be questioned whether this is indeed a book on Foundations of international thought. In light of the themes covered by this collection, the reader might rather be tempted to describe it as Foundations of British or AngloAmerican International Thought. But it falls short of this description too, since Armitage fails to explain what is foundational even to such British or Anglo-American International Thought or to lay out the general criteria for selecting his references. Admittedly, raising such concerns about the choice of the materials may sound unfair as the essays collected here were probably not conceived as part of a unified work originally. The lack of a unified structure in the book might equally be excused if it were the result of the author’s conscious departure from unitary history towards post-modern, fragmentary histories. On any such approach, however, the reader is left in the dark. Be that as it may, the choice of the topics for inclusion in Foundations cannot have been completely random, and some elucidation would have been helpful to make sense of the work and of the methodological premises. In the introduction Armitage announces that in the following chapters he will attempt to illustrate that international law rested on foundations laid in ‘the period roughly defined by the public careers of Thomas Hobbes and Jeremy Bentham’ (p. 8). Yet he does not succeed. What he does achieve instead is to demonstrate how certain political and legal principles, institutions and texts developed within Book Reviews domestic settings eventually informed, more or less deliberately, international theory and practice. Armitage provides less a history of enduring or paradigmatic international ideas than an exposition of how certain domestic ideas grew international. To have delivered this through meticulous and cogent research is obviously a conspicuous result, but has little to do with tracing foundations of international legal thought. To be sure, holding on to the language of foundations and focusing on national sources is perfectly legitimate. Yet it would not be correct to characterise this attitude as the one that current scholarship on international thought needs most. Instead of striving to seek a glimmer of international theory in the long perused writings of the greatest authorities of political philosophy, the paramount task in the field today is to assess marginal international doctrines which have never been incorporated into the canon of international law and relations for scientific and political reasons, or which are entirely neglected these days because written in ancient or non-European languages and hence inaccessible to many. Plausibly, innovative research has to open up to this peripheral literature rather than crystallize around traditional and authoritative, if scrupulously dissected doctrines. Walter Rech Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, University of Helsinki Email: [email protected] doi:10.1093/icon/mot032 Justin O. Frosini. Constitutional Preambles at a Crossroads between Politics and Law. Maggioli Editore, 2012. 174 pages. €19. ISBN: 9788838765731. One of the recurring problems plaguing young researchers, especially doctoral students, is their fear of writing something 831 redundant, something that is seemingly “selfevident,” something that is “not complex enough.” This fear leads many into overly convoluted linguistic, methodological, and conceptual constructions—a problem further exacerbated by the growing pressure to deploy interdisciplinary approaches. Likewise, this reviewer and his peers tended to dismiss many of the research topics our experienced teacher in a doctoral seminar suggested as too obvious, too unimportant, too mainstream— basically, as not earth-shattering enough. To which Professor Van Evera would retort: “Where is the footnote?” that we were going to use in our assignments to establish scientifically that obvious, unimportant, mainstream, earthly fact. If—as almost always happened— we were unable to name a suitable reference, he liked to point out that we had once again stumbled upon one of those “Books and Art icles That Someone Should Write.”1 Science is a collaborative enterprise, he kept reminding us, not all parts of which automatically concerned investigations into ultimate questions of life and death—providing that one footnote to settle an ostensibly inconsequential fact is a perfectly honorable and eminently necessary part of our common scientific endeavor. The book under review shows in a laudably transparent manner how something that appears to be settled and fairly negligible can yield surprising insights, where the data gradually leads the reader to abandon his or her preconceived notions to almost unperceptively realizing in the end that the author was right, namely that in this—admittedly relatively small—corner of comparative law his hunch had been correct and the majority wrong. Justin Frosini has taken a deceptively simple question—“[Are] preambles really without practical applicability? Are they truly nonoperative?” (p. 17)—and answered it clearly and comprehensively, and has thereby written one of those books that someone should write. Quite beyond its substantive content, his book should serve as a model for young researchers 1 Stephen Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science 98 (1997).
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