Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-495rp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-04T13:44:55.817Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

19 - The Hidden Theology of International Legal Positivism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2021

Pamela Slotte
Affiliation:
Åbo Akademi University
John D. Haskell
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
Get access

Summary

This chapter is a study in the critical deconstruction of one of the most popular theoretical paradigms in modern international law and its basic ideological impact on international law as a discipline. The paradigm in question is voluntarist positivism, and the general thrust of its ideological impact on the discipline of international law, I am going to argue, has been to encourage within it the rise and spread of what one might call a theoretical culture of bad faith – a mix of false consciousness, self-censorship, and a “crooked attitude towards truth and knowledge”– particularly, in what concerns international law’s relationship with natural law and Christian theology.

The last two sentences use a lot of notoriously ambivalent concepts. For the prevention of doubt, let me explain briefly how I understand them in these pages.

Type
Chapter
Information
Christianity and International Law
An Introduction
, pp. 415 - 460
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Recommended Reading

Fassbender, Bardo, and Peters, Anne, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Kammerhofer, Jörg, and d’Aspremont, Jean, eds. International Legal Positivism in a Post-Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Kennedy, David. “A New World Order: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.” Transnational Law Contemporary Problems 4, no. 2 (1994): 329–76.Google Scholar
Kennedy, Duncan. A Critique of Adjudication: (fin de siècle). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Marks, Susan. The Riddle of All Constitutions: International Law, Democracy, and the Critique of Ideology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Olsen, Frances E.The Family and the Market: A Study of Ideology and Legal Reform.” Harvard Law Review 96, no. 7 (1983): 1497–578.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×