Dreams Born and Shattered 377smaller amount than before. It is not surprising that Scelle’s ideas of world
federalism were regarded with a certain degree of detachment, if not be-
musement, in international-law circles. Hudson, for example, reviewing
Scelle’s Précis, wryly characterized it as “not a book of the international law
of today, but it may be a book of the international law of tomorrow.” It
proved a prescient remark, as Scelle’s ideas became the foundation for the
constitutionalist movement in international law in the late twentieth and
early twenty- fi rst centuries.
Another manifestation of the solidarist outlook went under the label of
functionalism, which in turn came in several variants. One of them was a
fairly straightforward descendant of nineteenth- century St.- Simonism, with
its technocratic, nonpo liti cal outlook. It stressed the integration of the world
in nonpo liti cal ways. Its leading fi gure was the Romanian writer David
Mitrany, whose principal inspiration was the New Deal of Franklin Roo se-
velt in the United States in the 1930s.
Paralleling Mitrany’s work, but more strictly in the legal vein, was the
writing of the American scholar Pitman B. Potter. He was a successor to
Reinsch in the Department of Po liti cal Science of the University of Wiscon-
sin— as well as in his focus on nonpo liti cal international organizations as a
powerful force for world order. He became the fi rst systematic expounder of
a law of international organizations, with a massive treatise on the subject in
1922. Central to his outlook was an insistence on the need to “get below
the logical, rhetorical, even literary forms of the law to its basic conditions
and foundations.” Th e true bases of international law, he contended, are
found in “the fundamental physical conditions of national life and interna-
tional relations and their so cio log i cal interpretation.” He articulated a vi-
sion of a rationally administered world, less on the basis of legal norms than
of scientifi c management. “[W]hat is needed for the regulation... of inter-
national relations,” he insisted, “is not ‘international law’ in the conven-
tional sense, but legislation and administration.” He went on to assert that
“[i]t might almost be said that an ounce of international administration is
worth a pound of ‘international law.’ ”
An intriguingly eclectic brand of solidarism was put forward in the United
States by an American po liti cal scientist named Harold Lasswell, who was
based at the University of Chicago. His early work was in the fi eld of social
psychology, on the subject of war propaganda. Th is led to a long- term interest