Breaking with the Past 243best one to follow, on purely rational, utilitarian grounds. Th e Axelrod
experiment, to be sure, was conducted in somewhat artifi cial conditions,
in a framework vastly simpler than that of world aff airs in general. But it
does provide some grounds for believing that the neo- Kantian dream of
order emerging from an underlying regime of freedom might not be so
far- fetched.Th e Synthesis— Mainstream Positivism
It is evident from the preceding survey that the three versions of positivism
could, with some justice, be regarded as being so distinct from one another
as to make it impossible for them to be placed under a single label without
serious distortion. But there were substantial overlaps between them, to the
point that it proved possible to bring them into a sort of rough harmony by
making some judicious compromises, reinterpretations, or de- emphases of
various aspects of the three systems. Th e result was an amalgamation—
though not always a very tidy or logical one— of the three variants. For lack
of a generally accepted label, this amalgamation will be referred to as “main-
stream positivism.”
Dualism provides a good illustration of the manner in which a core belief
of one school could be shared by the others without undue diffi culty. Th e
empiricists, most obviously, had little trouble adopting it. Th e reason was
that the core idea— that national law and international law have diff erent
sources— made intuitive sense to the empiricists, even though that notion
was not a central feature of their approach. Th e voluntarists, in contrast,
rejected dualism in principle. But even they could agree readily enough with
one of its main implications: that it is not possible for international law to
impose rules into the internal laws of states. Dualism accordingly became
one of the features of mainstream positivism, even though there was not
actually thoroughgoing agreement on its nature and content.
For the most part, the mainstream positivist synthesis comprised elements
of thought that were common property to the three variants, even if the con-
tributions of one or another to par tic u lar issues were more conspicuous.
Th ere can be, of course, no question of mainstream positivism being a single
monolithic doctrine. Nor is it possible (or necessary) to give an exhaustive