Building Anew 427Solidarist ways of thinking gained an especially fi rm hold in the United
States in the years following World War II, and it is not diffi cult to see why. In
the country’s relatively sudden emergence as a global superpower, the impor-
tance of concrete historical circumstances was vividly evident. Th ere was
also the heritage of the American New Deal of the 1930s, in which technical
expertise, centralization of authority, and a focus on economic development
had played such conspicuous roles— leavened by a strong tinge of liberal ide-
alism. Th e New Dealers were, in so many ways, latter- day St.- Simonians.
New York was one place where solidarist ideas took a fi rm hold, at Co-
lumbia and New York Universities— to the point that the label “Manhattan
School” has sometimes been applied to writers based there. At New York
University, Clyde Ea gleton advanced ideas distinctly in tune with Scelle’s
dédoublement fonctionnel. Like Scelle, he had little patience with positivist
doctrines of state sovereignty, maintaining instead that the state should be
seen as “the agent of the [international] community,” carry ing out that com-
munity’s policies within the ambit of its jurisdiction. A failure to discharge
the duties incumbent upon that agency role must result, in Ea gleton’s opin-
ion, in legal liability to the larger community.
Uptown, at Columbia University Law School, Wolfgang Friedmann con-
tinued his support, begun in the interwar years, for the idea that interna-
tional law (and indeed all law) is “closely tied to the structure of the society
which it seeks to regulate.” His book Th e Changing Structure of International
Law (1964) may be regarded as t he single best exposition of solidarist t hought
of the fi rst postwar generation. Friedmann lamented that current interna-
tional law was “no more than a loose and patchy structure of relations be-
tween sovereign States.” But he looked forward to a time when it would be
transformed from “an essentially negative code of rules of abstention” into a
set of “positive rules of co- operation.”
Philip Jessup was another prominent fi gure. He was on the faculty of Co-
lumbia Law School, but also did diplomatic work, some of which proved
controversial. As the author of the famous (or notorious) white paper on
China in 1949, which urged American dissociation from the Nationalist
government, he became a target of conservative anti- Communist activists.
In par tic u lar, Senator Joseph McCarthy accused him of being a Soviet sym-
pathizer. He weathered these attacks and went on to serve as a World Court