180 Reason and Its Rivals (ca. 1550– 1815)It should be added that international law would also have its ants— those
who held international law to consist of state practice itself, unleavened by
speculation. But they would not achieve prominence until the nineteenth
century (under the more dignifi ed label of positivists).
Rationalists and Pragmatists
It has been observed that international lawyers saw themselves, in the late
seventeenth and eigh teenth centuries, as being divided into the two con-
tending schools of the Grotians and the naturalists. Between them, the di-
viding line was drawn with surgical precision. Th e one group held interna-
tional law to comprise a union between two bodies of law (natural law plus
the voluntary law of nations), while the other held it to consist only of one
(natural law alone). As clear as this distinction was, however, another divi-
sion was more important— though less apparent to the naked eye. It was less
apparent because there was no clear chasm separating the one group from
the other, but instead a continuum along which the writers on international
law ranged. For lack of any accepted label (as usual), this continuum will
simply be termed the international- law spectrum.
Th is spectrum is best described by ta k ing note of its opposing end points.
Th ese could be characterized in a couple of diff erent ways. One is in terms
of rival strategies of order: a top- down strategy, contrasted with a bottom-
up one. A top- down strategy sees rules as being dictated from, as it were,
some “outside”— and superior— source. In the case of international law,
that outside source was not a global sovereign, but instead was the law of
nature. In the rationalist tradition of natural law, these rules are best seen
as being transcendental in nature, because they are based on logical con-
clusions objectively arrived at from initial axioms, in the hypothetico-
deductive style of mathematics. As in mathematics, there is no component
of human free will. Humans are welcome to comprehend the system, as
best their fallible sense of reason will allow. But they are not free to change
it. In this sense, then, a pure strategy of order from above may be de-
scribed as authoritarian— not in the sense that enforcement of it is oppres-
sive, but rather in the sense that there is an absence of human input into its
content.