Global Governance and the “Clandestine Revolution”: From the Legal State to the Judicial State

Abstract

Concerned over the growing power of international courts and adjudicative bodies, this essay analyzes how this particular source of law is moving the international order toward a teleocratic governance and away from a rule of law. The author finds in Oakeshott’s distinctions between teleocratic and nomocratic states and between a politics of faith and a politics of skepticism a way to help us unpack this growing shift toward an international order that is envisioned as an enterprise for reshaping the world in its image instead of providing a framework within which states and individuals can pursue their own self-chosen ends. A global universitas is emerging that threatens the very freedom and pluralism the proponents of this universal perspective believe they are advancing but that is in fact corrosive of the very freedom and the rule of law that protects it.