Building Anew 429in the international-relations sense of the term, with its single- minded focus
on power.
In keeping with the general solidarist outlook, Lasswell and McDougal
had little patience with normative, conceptualist, logical approaches of the
sort championed by the Vienna School. Th ey looked to the rough- and-
tumble reality of international life for the emergence of values. Th e mission
of lawyers, according to this school of thought, is not to determine the con-
tents of rules, in the manner of traditional lawyers. It is to remake the world
at large by disseminating the eight values as vigorously and comprehen-
sively as possible. Th eirs was a doctrine for activists rather than analysts, for
reformers rather than scholars. Lasswell liked to describe his fi eld of study
as “policy science” instead of “po liti cal science,” so as to stress its activist
character. In the same spirit, McDougal referred to his legal philosophy as
“policy- oriented jurisprudence.” Instead of prosaic- sounding “international
law,” he preferred to expound upon “world public order.”
Perhaps the most distinctive thing about the New Haven School was the
stress that it placed on the pro cess of decision making as the essence of law.
McDougal and Lasswell actually defi ned law as “the making of authoritative
and controlling decisions.” Only in very minor part, however, did this re-
fer to decision making by courts or tribunals. Th ey were interested in all
manner of decisions in the public sphere, from the local neighborhood mi-
lieu, all the way up to the global level. Modesty of ambition was not one of
their traits.
Several points about the New Haven School are worth noting. One is that
it was strongly consensus- oriented. It was decidedly nonconfrontational,
with a stress on the changing of values as opposed to the application of
sanctions. In this respect, the New Haven School may be regarded as a di-
rect heir of those strands of functionalist thought in the 1930s that had ex-
pressed opposition to the idea of a coercive League. Th e New Haven School
was certainly not opposed in principle to sanctions by international organi-
zations (as, say, Borchard was). But sanctions were not at the center of their
system. Th e mission (as it could fairly be called) of the New Haven School
was to induce the sovereign states to endorse the eightfold value program of
their own free will, by winning the allegiance of the elites that governed
them. One eff ect of this outlook was to give the New Haven School a certain
propagandistic, or evangelistic, fl avor. But it also meant that the New Haven