Breaking with the Past 237clear implication that the society, rather than the individual members of
that society, is the fundamental unit of social life and, more broadly, of the
world historical pro cess.
In the sphere of legal thought, these ideas found their foremost spokes-
man in the Prus sian scholar Otto von Gierke, who was a follower of Hegel.
He was a legal historian, not an international lawyer. But he made a major
contribution to the voluntarist variant of positivist thought by fi rmly insist-
ing, in the spirit of Rousseau, on the real personality of the state. Th is notion
became one of the key tenets of “neo- Hegelian” legal thought, which fl our-
ished, chiefl y in Germany, in the late nineteenth century.
Neo- Hegelianism was basically a combination of the philosophy of Hegel
with the insights of the historical school of law, which was another of the
major innovations of the nineteenth century. Its principal champion was the
German lawyer Friedrich Carl von Savigny, a Roman-law scholar who taught
at the University of Berlin— incidentally overlapping with Hegel. At the
core of the historical school was the idea that each society possesses its own
distinct ethos: its own set of customs, historical experiences, literary and
artistic expression, ways of thinking— and legal tradition, too. On this the-
ory, there can be no single overarching universal standard or ideal type of
law to be applied worldwide. Instead, there is an assortment of distinctive
national traditions, none of which is reducible to any other. It is readily ap-
parent that this belief entails a rejection of natural law, with its cosmopoli-
tan, universalist ethos— thereby making the historical school, in an impor-
tant sense, a staunch ally of positivism.
Th is pluralistic outlook of the historical school, when combined with the
collectivist ethos of Hegel’s philosophy, resulted in a school of thought that
exalted the sovereignty of individual states to previously unknown heights.
Th is neo- Hegelian outlook was decidedly inward- looking, insisting on each
state as the sole judge of its own interests and goals. Each state was regarded
as being embarked on a mission of fulfi lling its own unique destiny, deter-
mined by its own unique social, economic, religious, and historical makeup.
Th e task of the members of the society was to devote themselves to the fur-
thering of that great collective mission. In retrospect, it is all too easy to see
in neo- Hegelianism some worrying premonitions of fascism.
So high a value did the neo- Hegelian writers place on state sovereignty
that they insisted that what was commonly referred to as “international law”