‘Like a Tree in the Garden of State Sciences’: From Staatswissenschaften to External Public Law (original) (raw)
2021, European Journal of International Law
The final chapter of To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth brings the book's diachronic story of (one of) the idiomatic languages of ius gentium and ius naturale to a close. The story of the law of nature and of nations in its 18th-century German usages is not exactly one of rise and fall, apogee and nadir. Rather, it is (for international lawyers at least) a salutary revisiting of a connection between natural law and state-making, and between law of nations and the well-ordered Polizeistaat, which remains recessed in the historical recollection of 20th-and 21st-century international law's historical consciousness. While 20th-century international law reinvented its origin stories in the Salamanca Scholastic and the Dutch Golden Age, the important lineage of contemporary vocabularies and genres of international legal and political thought with the German sciences of the state as they developed after 1648 is rarely recognized. 1 These ways of thinking about and, in some sense, enacting and producing public power and state-concepts have become the subject of revived interest and inquiry in histories of economic and political thought, 2 inspired in part by Foucault's influential
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