Dreams Born and Shattered 375invoked Duguit. He was also at one with the solidarists in his harsh criti-
cism of state sovereignty, which he insisted “must be abandoned, or else the
binding character of international law must be denied.” He was nothing if
not consistent in his stance. If (as he favored) sovereignty is to be abandoned
altogether, then along with it, the concepts of the absolute equality of states
and the fundamental rights of states must also be ruthlessly discarded. He
explicitly allied himself with Álvarez in denying the voluntarist doctrine of
the real personality of the state.
Th e most systematic writer in the solidarist cause was a French lawyer,
Georges Scelle, who was a direct intellectual successor to Durkheim and
Duguit. He was active in labor aff airs and taught both international law and
labor law at the University of Dijon for some twenty years. As a partisan of
the po liti cal left , he was active in public aff airs, serving briefl y as a chef de
cabinet to the minister of labor in the government of Édouard Herriot in
1924– 25. For over thirty- fi ve years, he served the International Labor Or ga-
ni za tion as a member of its Commission of Enquiry on International Labor
Conventions. In 1933, he moved from Dijon to the University of Paris. Th e
detailed statement of his solidarist vision of international law was set out in
a book entitled Précis de droit des gens (Summary of the Law of Nations) in
1932– 34.
Underlying Scelle’s legal thought was a conception of society that had a
strongly biological tinge, seeing all of the components of a social system as
working together, in the manner of the organs and systems of a living crea-
ture. Th is gave his thought a certain affi nity to organicist conceptions of
natural law. While he had a cautious respect for natural law, primarily for its
idealistic character, he also insisted that static natural law— that is, a system
of a fi xed and unchangeable set of principles— must be rejected, in favor of
what he called a “natural law of social development.” Th is was regarded as
dynamic in nature and was expressly described as “a biological law.” At
the heart of his system was what Scelle called “objective law,” which was the
law that best corresponded to the social character and needs of a given soci-
ety. Th is was not— or not necessarily— the same as positive law, which sim-
ply refl ected the will of those holding po liti cal power at a given time.
A fundamental feature of Scelle’s thought was his insistence that interna-
tional society consists of individuals rather than of states. Th is entailed strong
opposition to the voluntarist version of positivism, with its focus on states as