Dissident Voices 265contributions to the subject in the nineteenth century. Th e two principal
ones were Johann Kaspar Bluntschli (from Switzerland and Germany) and
James Lorimer (from Britain).
Bluntschli was a protean fi gure. Originally Swiss, he studied in Germany,
where his primary allegiance was to the historical school of law, with Savi-
gny himself as one of his teachers. He took a teaching position at the Univer-
sity of Zürich but was forced out of it because of po liti cal activities. He went
to Munich, where he taught constitutional law. In 1861, he moved to the
University of Heidelberg, where he remained for the rest of his career. A
private law code that he draft ed for the city of Zürich in the 1850s became
the basis for the Swiss Civil Code. For the major part of his career, he was a
po liti cal theorist and constitutional-law specialist. His text on the General
Th eory of the State (1851) won a place on the syllabus at Oxford University
and was infl uential in the United States as well. Tracts on theology and psy-
chology fl owed from his fertile pen. Not until he was in his late fi fties did he
turn his diligent attention to international law, producing a text in the form
of a codifi cation of the subject, published in 1868.
Natural law, to Bluntschli, was the foundation of international law. But
this was not natural law as it been expounded in the Grotian tradition.
Rather, it was natural law of an organicist, rather than a rationalist, variety—
more akin to the ancient stoics than to the medieval Aristotelians and their
successors. Bluntschli regarded natural law in psychological terms, as some-
thing hardwired into the psyches of every individual human being—
returning, in short, to the idea of natural law as being “written in the hearts
of men” (instead of being extracted from the treatises of pedants). Law, pos-
ited Bluntschli, “rests more upon human nature [in general] than upon the
peculiarities of Peoples” as po liti cal collectivities. In the very opening pas-
sages of his international law treatise, he asserted that “international law has
a solid base and indestructible roots in human nature.”
In deference to the prevailing positivist outlook, Bluntschli conceded that
“[c]ertainly the free will of man is able to eff ect and alter in many ways what
is right and just.” But he immediately went on to surmise that
the greatest part of this [i.e., of human ideas of justice and moral right]
has been fi xed from everlasting by the order of the world and the
nature of men and circumstances, and is altogether in de pen dent of the