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An Epilogue on an Epilogue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

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As the last straw, a question: where does it (From Apology to Utopia) lead us to, what are we to make of and with it (international law)? The author himself hints at an answer in the very last sentence of the Epilogue, which marks the difference between the original and this new edition of From Apology to Utopia (FATU), by pointing to his second Hauptwerk, the seminal Gentle Civilizer of Nations and the story about international lawyers it tells. Indeed, the last paragraph of FATU thereby becomes a sort of epi-epilogue, an interpretive afterthought on Gentle Civilizer, written after the original FATU, within the afterthought of FATU's new edition, written after Gentle Civilizer. The latter is taken to illustrate the consequences of FATU for both individual practitioner and academic lawyers, notably the continuous double bind between law and politics inherent in the structure of international law. That double bind demands, according to Koskenniemi, at once coolness and passion, that is, as he concludes, “a full mastery of the grammar and a sensitivity to the uses to which it is put.” This, of course, alludes once again to the twofold intent that inspires FATU: to disinter with archeological precision the grammatical structure of international law and to thereby enable its critique, or, as the author puts it in the Epilogue, to join a descriptive with a normative project. The double-edged argument that has resulted from this combination has uniquely captured the letter and spirit of international legal practice and has mesmerized the international legal profession ever since it first appeared in 1989. Together with Gentle Civilizer, it has justly made its author into one of the iconic figures of international legal theory of the intellectual fin-de-siècle of the outgoing twentieth and the incoming twenty-first century. Yet, for all the echoes FATU has been occasioning in virtually all corners of the legal theoretical spectrum, the consequences that flow from it for legal theory and practice have remained somewhat under-explored.

Type
Articles: Special Issue
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

1 The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy usefully informs that the idiomatic expression ‘the last straw’ refers, amongst others, to “the last in a series of grievances or burdens that finally exceeds the limits of endurance”; [see E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002; see also online at http://www.bartleby.com/br/59.html]; after the preceding assemblage of splendid texts, this ‘epilogue’ may, indeed, have that effect, apology for which is, in anticipation, already humbly offered.Google Scholar

2 Koskenniemi, Martti, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: the rise and fall of international law 1870–1960 (2004).Google Scholar

3 Koskenniemi, Martti, From Apology to Utopia, 617 (2006).Google Scholar

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6 In fact, in a legal field so dominated by formalism, historization has been bound to play a critical role, which, in part, explains why so many critical legal works are but histories of a particular subject matter within ‘mainstream’ law; on this, see George Rodrigo Bandeira Galindo, Martti Koskenniemi and the Historiographical Turn in International Law, 16 Eur J Int'l L 539–559 (2005).Google Scholar

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