This chapter contains four snapshots depicting the state of international legal scholarship at the time of the League of Nations. The first captures the zeitgeist of scholarship during the interwar period and identifies some features that defined this emerging epistemic community. It also considers the extent to which scholars may have had an influence outside academic circles. The second and third snapshots focus on various intertwined debates of the time. In this regard, consideration is given to the debates on the ultimate source of international obligations and the broader discussions about scientific method and the place of ideology in international law. This is done by reference, in particular, to the approaches and/or theories followed by Kelsen, Lauterpacht, (French) legal sociology and jus naturalism. The fourth snapshot elaborates on these debates by focusing on state sovereignty as the vantage point where most doctrinal trends of the time intersect. It identifies liberalism as the ideology underpinning such criticisms and compares them with the views held, first, by controversial German scholar Carl Schmitt and. second, by Soviet legal theorists.

Hobbes posed for modernity what we can think of as the puzzle – even the paradox – of sovereignty. The sovereign of a particular polity is the person or body who wields ultimate authority to make law. It follows, he claimed, that the sovereign is legally unlimited. But for Hobbes, any sovereign is legally constituted in that it must comply with what I call the ‘validity mark’ of sovereignty: Legal change must happen in accordance with the criteria of validity. In addition, there is the ‘fundamental legality mark’: To count as an act of sovereign will, a law must be consistent with the laws of nature, in more contemporary terms with the fundamental legal commitments of the legal order. Hobbes’s idea of sovereignty is thus a legal idea, which contrasts with the figure that haunts politics today, the ‘political idea of sovereignty’. I argue that in order to properly oppose the troubling figure of the political sovereign, one needs to have in place not only both marks of sovereignty, but also a political theory of their value. There is a politics to the legal idea of sovereignty.

There have been more than 400 years of research surrounding the state, but its concept remains iridescent and varies between different legal cultures. This contribution asks why and how the concept of the state evolved in continental Europe and examines why the term did not enter the legal terminology of England and later the US. It introduces four influential concepts of the state from the constitutional theory of the 19th and 20th century and shows how these concepts have set the paths on which debate around the state still moves today. Finally, the chapter revisits the most famous critiques of the concept, to then answer the central question surrounding the “state” in constitutional theory: what use does the concept retain today.

This chapter explores the critiques of modern liberal democracy presented by Carl Schmitt and Michel Foucault. Both thinkers challenge the foundational premises of liberal democracy, questioning the role of the individual citizen as a political agent. Foucault, through his concept of power, challenged the view of the modern individual as a free political agent. For Schmitt, the rivalry between friend and foe is so deep that it politicizes all other areas. In his view, antagonism between communities is the driving force of political life. The analysis extends to Bruno Latour, who challenges the dualistic cosmology inherent in modern democracy. Latour proposes a secular monistic cosmology, blurring distinctions between Nature/Culture, individuals and objects. He criticizes the reliance on external facts and on the separation between subject and object. Latour proposes the mother tongue as a basis for commonsense, but unlike the perception of liberal democracy, it does not rely on a scientific epistemology of cause and effect or objectivity. The chapter contends that the decay of democratic practices and the widening gap between democratic ideals and realities may necessitate novel imaginaries.

This chapter ties together the narratives presented in the book’s three substantive chapters to provide an overview of the conceptual history of ethnicity. The chapter then unpacks the ideological functions performed by this concept in service of the international order, and recaps how the emergence of ethnicity contributed to both the negation and preservation of imperial hierarchies. Drawing inspiration from Carl Schmitt’s discussion of ‘nomos’, the chapter concludes by proposing a speculative notion of ‘ethnos’ as the foundational ordering of beings.

This chapter looks at Mehmed Akif’s fundamental acceptance of the nation-state and reconciliation of Turkish and Islamic identity and sets that against Sabri and Kevseri’s theoretical objections, which centre on the argument that the shariʿa system with its notion of a legal and moral core above the manipulations of politics and society was superior to man-made law. Noting that their work came (1) as Egypt finalised the process of codification and de-Islamisation of its courts and (2) as the era of military authoritarianism began its long reign in the Arab region, it goes on to examine Sabri’s development of a radical view of Islamic faith and identity in the context of the modern state and how this may have impacted Sayyid Quṭb’s thinking.

Chapter 5 reads Carl Schmitt’s Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy as an account of a rhetorical crisis. Schmitt characterizes twentieth-century parliamentary speech as an empty ritual and proposes a turn toward effective rituals of speech that might supplant it. Schmitt’s assimilation of rhetoric and ritual is an important insight. But his rhetorical theory takes a troubling, authoritarian turn in its understanding of the conditions under which ritual becomes meaningful. For Schmitt, “eloquence is only possible against the background of an imposing authority,” and ritual must actively shape the political world. But with a richer understanding of ritual, we can retain what is of value in Schmitt’s account without following him to his authoritarian conclusions. Just such a richer understanding of ritual is available in the work of Adam Seligman et al. For them, ritual is action in the “subjunctive” mood, “the creation of an order as if it were truly the case.” Ritual is not an effort to shape the world, but a response to the world’s perceived brokenness. In this light, what the rhetorical tradition has to offer us is not a way of resolving the tension between speech and action, but a way of living in that tension.

Justice is a political value that holds across reasonable comprehensive doctrines. I introduce the notion of a frame of human life. For Aristotle, the polis does that job, but nowadays the institutions and practices that do so are embedded into the human web. To call something a “political value” – beyond the generic sense of pertaining to the creation of order – means that it pertains to the design of that frame. Justice is the value of giving each their own within this frame. The political value of distributive justice gives rise to principles of justice, which generate rights and duties. Justice honors the distinctiveness of each within the distinctively human life. That is why the value of distributive justice is the most stringent value. Justice as a value radiates into different domains of practical reasoning in ways that principles, rights, or duties do not. It takes exceptionally strong considerations to offset justice.

This chapter argues that a negative political theology helps to address the problem posed by the persistence of the sacred. Giorgio Agamben argues that, whether it derives from religious worship or national identity, reverence for the sacred functions to neutralize resistance. My account of hope indicates on the contrary that a concern for transcendence can intensify critique. Rather than affirming the sacred uncritically or disavowing it altogether, communities can acknowledge the special significance of particular texts and traditions while maintaining an ethical discipline that loosens their authority. Some political movements find it difficult to combine critique of the status quo with concrete proposals, but hope offers a way to affirm particular policies while subjecting them to ongoing critique.

Drawing upon Carl Schmitt’s idea of the katechon - a theological figure of the ‘restrainer’ - it is argued that two different accounts of ‘restraint’ operate within contemporary historiography. In one, the USA and the Soviet Union assume the role of the katechon during the Cold War, holding at bay an earthly apocalypse, securing stability through their mutual enmity. In the other, liberal account, it is the Cold War itself that acts as the restrainer, holding back the promises of Kant’s enlightenment project of world government, and of the securing of global peace through law. Each of these accounts has problematic effects: either by operating as an apology for the power of the guarantors of order, or by denying/deferring responsibility for the present state of affairs. We are therefore asked to think, instead, about international law and its history through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s conception of ‘weak messianic power’.

The Introduction sets out the questions at stake in the book. It argues that while practical political life is always guided by a pretheoretical understanding of politics, among theorists today there is no common agreement on the question of what politics actually is. The most illuminating response to this question has come from Hannah Arendt, but to fully grasp her response we have to do two things: to make explicit the understanding of politics implicit in her work; and to follow the way of thought by which she reached this understanding.

This chapter takes up the friends and enemies of the liberal world order of 1919, beginning with the anti-liberal provocations of the postwar avant-garde. At its center it focuses on the ambivalent relationship of Leonard and Virginia Woolf to liberal internationalism. I propose a new reading of the political Virginia Woolf as a writer devoted to rethinking liberal governance, rather than a critic writing “against empire,” and read her breakthrough anti-bildungsroman, Jacob’s Room, as an extended inquiry into liberal governmental order. I put Woolf’s approach to liberal government in dialogue with H. G. Wells’s World State fiction and his Outline of History, a major intellectual event of the postwar period.