376 Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (1914– )real persons and the true subjects of international law. In this, he was in
agreement with the Vienna School. He was also a sharp critic of the dualism
of the common- will school, contending instead— like Kelsen— that legal sci-
ence must comprise, ultimately, a unifi ed system with a worldwide reach
and no sharp separation between national and international law. As a re-
sult, state offi cials must be regarded, on Scelle’s thesis, as acting in a dual
capacity— as servants of both national law and international law at the same
time. Scelle described this phenomenon as dédoublement fonctionnel.
Th is has been rendered in En glish as “role splitting,” but something like
“dual- role functioning” seems more accurate (if awkward).
Th e picture of the world drawn by Scelle has been described as “federal-
ist,” in the sense that he saw the states of the world not as in de pen dent enti-
ties, seeking to maximize their own self- prescribed interests, but instead as
components of a larger international society. International law should there-
fore be seen as the constitutional law of that larger society— integrating the
various units and levels of government into a (more or less) coherent system
and allocating competences to the various levels of government, broadly in
the manner of national constitutions. Part of the role of this law is to ensure
that the various components of this integrated system do not overstep their
allocated functions.
If Scelle was in agreement with the Vienna School in holding a monist
conception of law, and also in rejecting the voluntarist and common-will
versions of positivism, his overall outlook was very diff erent. Where Kelsen’s
approach was coldly intellectual, with all extraneous matter carefully ex-
cluded from his “pure” theory of law, Scelle’s thought was strongly rooted in
the economic and social trends of the real world. His theory was very far
from “pure.” In his opinion, legal norms emerge out of actual international
practice. “[T]he essential objective norms of all of international society” were
identifi ed by him as “notions acquired by the universal conscience” and offi -
cially recognized by governments.
Scelle candidly admitted that his federalist, or constitutional, vision of
international law existed, as yet, only in the most rudimentary form. But
he was optimistic that it was on its way. Th e task of realizing his vision was
expressly compared to that of Sisyphus pushing his rock ever uphill, only to
have it roll back down. He expressed confi dence (or perhaps faith) that, in
each round of this chore, the constitutional rock rolled downward by a slightly