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Jurisprudence for a Solidarist World: Richard Falk’s Grotian Moment

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Abstract

That the contemporary world may be entering another “Grotian moment” for legal scholarship is a thought-provoking idea closely associated with the work of Richard Falk.1 Reduced to fundamentals, it is the claim that a transformative change in the organization and modus operandi of international life is presently occurring that is reminiscent of a revolutionary change three or four centuries ago that was captured by the jurisprudence of Hugo Grotius. A useful purpose might be served by assessing this idea with a view to its heuristic value for helping us understand world jurisprudence as we settle into the twenty-first century.

The cosmopolitan society which is implied and presupposed in our talk of human rights exists only as an ideal, and we court great dangers if we allow ourselves to proceed as if it were a political and social framework already in place.

Hedley Bull

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Notes

  1. Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992);

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  2. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1995).

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  3. For an incisive account of his thought see Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), ch. 3.

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  4. Richard Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 20–23.

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  5. Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (New York: Dover Publications, 1988), p. 245 (original emphasis).

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  6. Martin Wight, Systems of States, ed. Hedley Bull (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1977), p. 127.

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  7. Hedley Bull, “The Importance of Grotius in the Study of International Relations,” in H. Bull, B. Kingsbury, and A. Roberts (eds.), Hugo Grotius and International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 65.

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  8. Hedley Bull, “Natural Law and International Relations,” British Journal of International Studies, vol. 5 (1979), p. 171.

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  9. See L. Gross, “The Peace of Westphalia,” The American Journal of International Law, vol. 42 (January 1948), pp. 20–41.

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  10. G. Mattingly, The Armada (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959).

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  11. See E.L. Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economics and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), esp. chs. 6–7.

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  12. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York: Academic Press, 1974).

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  13. Also see some of the essays in H. Bull and A. Watson (eds.), The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).

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  14. See Myers S. McDougal and associates, Studies in World Public Order (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960).

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  15. See R.H. Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

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  16. J.L. Brierly, The Law of Nations, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 30.

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  17. This argument is made at length in Robert Jackson, The Global Covenant: Human Conduct in a World of States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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© 2005 Robert Jackson

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Jackson, R. (2005). Jurisprudence for a Solidarist World: Richard Falk’s Grotian Moment. In: Classical and Modern Thought on International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403979520_7

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