386 Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (1914– )international law by Soviet writers. It is more accurate to say that the Soviet
writers sought to employ existing doctrines in their favor— and that main-
stream positivism off ered ample scope for this strategy. A resolute insistence
on the principles of respect for state sovereignty, nonintervention, and the
strict equality of all states were consistent features of socialist thought— and
also core components of mainstream positivism. Socialist writers parted
from the positivists chiefl y in claiming to have a superior insight over the
nature of international law as a product of historical circumstance. But
even here, socialists and positivists were largely in agreement, since they
both viewed law as man- made, and hence as necessarily a product of his-
torical and material conditions. Soviet writing accordingly tended at
times to have a certain blustery character— aggressively asserting its nov-
elty and superiority, while in fact fi tting very comfortably within the posi-
tivist mainstream.
Fascists and Nazis
Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany made no lasting contributions to interna-
tional legal thought. In the Italian case, fascist thought moved largely in the
existing intellectual channels of mainstream positivism— and particularly
its extreme neo- Hegelian component. Th ere was a powerful stress on state
autarky, or self- suffi ciency, dutifully in line with Benito Mussolini’s po liti cal
and economic program. In this regard, fascist thought may be seen as an
extreme version of mainstream positivism’s stress on the in de pen dence
rather than the interdependence of states.
Th e only Italian fascist writer who devoted even token attention to inter-
national law was a professor of corporative studies (a fashionable subject at
the time) at the University of Pisa named Ugo Spirito. He began his intel-
lectual career as a positivist, gravitating to neo- Hegelianism. Attacking lib-
eralism for denying the existence of frontiers and nations, he called for “the
triumph of the corporative idea throughout the whole world.” He put for-
ward the thesis that the world should comprise an interlocking network of
autarkic, planned economies—“a system of collaboration between nations,”
as he described it, “under which every country, by or ga niz ing its economy
in a planned way, takes account of the or ga ni za tion prevailing in other
countries.”