Dreams Born and Shattered 373professorship of International Law at Cambridge University (as McNair’s
successor).
Lauterpacht soon revealed himself to be a scourge of mainstream positiv-
ism. He scornfully characterized the typical positivist lawyer as “a mere
chronicler of events laboriously woven into a purely formal pattern of a legal
system.” He forthrightly rejected the fundamental tenet of positivism, that
the consent of states is the foundation of international law, insisting instead
that the rules of international law “had their birth in de pen dently of [states’]
express or tacit consent.” He allowed only a marginal role to consent: as be-
ing required for the making of specifi c new rules of law. But he insisted that
consent is not a foundational principle of international law in general, as the
positivists believed. Instead, he maintained that the principles of interna-
tional law arise out of “the fact that States form a legal community.”
Another feature of positivism that Lauterpacht attacked was the dualism
of Triepel and Anzilotti. Lauterpacht pronounced himself to be in favor of a
“deliberately monistic” stance. International law, he contended, is “the supe-
rior and comprehensive legal order of which the systems of national juris-
prudence are in a real sense delegated systems of law.” Consequently, the
norms of national and international law are, in his opinion, of essentially
the same character, stressing “the fundamental analogy of individuals and
States, with the resulting approximation of the moral standards underlying
both.”
Liberalism was therefore much more fi rmly part of the international legal
scene now than it had been in the previous century. Th ere was still no single
comprehensive treatment of it, so it remained less visible than its rivals as an
intellectual school of thought. It was more in the nature, now as before, of a
program for various reforms than a corpus of systematic doctrine. In this
respect, it contrasts with solidarism, which achieved a high level of intellec-
tual development during this period.
Th e Solidarist (or So cio log i cal) School
Th e beginning of the solidarist (or so cio log i cal) school in the nineteenth cen-
tury, in the writing of Durkheim and Duguit, has been noted previously. It
was only in the interwar period, though, that this approach to international
law received, for the fi rst time, systematic treatment. Actually, “treatments”