Breaking with the Past 245
of life, by defi nition, precludes others from stepping in uninvited and dictat-
ing policies or forms of government. Positivists tended to hold that this
principle of nonintervention must hold true even in extreme cases, such as
instances of shocking mistreatment of subjects by their rulers. Humanitar-
ians might be in favor of foreign intervention to put a stop to the oppression.
But positivists were disposed to go no further than to hold that, while
humanitarian intervention (as it came to be labeled) might be morally justi-
fi able, it must nonetheless be held— with all of the cold dispassion of the true
scientist— to be legally impermissible.
In some respects, these ideas of the sovereign equality of states and the
principle of nonintervention were nothing new. It has been observed that
Pufendorf articulated them in the seventeenth century, as did Wolff and Vat-
tel in the eigh teenth. But with the disappearance of natural law, these ideas
had greater power and more profound implications than before. Pufendorf
and Vattel had asserted the in de pen dence of states from one another (i.e., t he
principle of nonintervention), but they had insisted states nonetheless always
remained subject to natural law, which was a kind of impersonal sovereign,
reigning over the teeming mass of mutually in de pen dent states.
Once that overriding authority of natural law was stripped away, state
sovereignty meant much more than it previously had. It meant that states
were not merely in de pen dent of the will or command of their fellow sover-
eigns. It meant that no law at all constrained the acts of states— except, of
course, laws accepted by the states themselves of their own free will. Main-
stream positivism, in short, was a radical charter of freedom for states, to
the point of holding state sovereignty to be more fundamental than the rule
of law itself.
Th e Fundamental Rights of States
Closely related to the cornerstone concept of the sovereign equality of states
was the notion of fundamental rights of states. Natural law had been, to a
very large extent, a law regarding duties of states rather than rights. Th is
had been particularly clear in Wolff ’s exposition (followed by Vattel), in
which the duties of states were carefully classifi ed into two categories: obli-
gations of a state to itself and obligations to other states. Natural law did,
however, recognize certain fundamental rights of individuals. Aquinas had