238 A Positive Century (1815–1914)was, in reality, merely the sovereign state’s own national law applied to the
area of foreign relations— oft en called “external state law” (Das äussere Sta-
atsrecht), on the pre ce dent of Hegel himself. Th is refl ected the essence of
the voluntarist position: that the individual sovereigns of each state are the
sole authorities who can make or accept law for that state, and that no exter-
nal agency can impose legal obligations on a state against its will. It is not
diffi cult to see that this approach comes extremely close to denying the pos-
sibility of international law altogether.
It may be noted that this voluntarist theory entails the rejection of the
dualist outlook of the common-will school. (In general, the voluntarists
were scornful opponents of the common- will adherents.) According to the
voluntarists, the diff erence in subject matter between domestic law and in-
ternational law is merely a superfi cial one. Fundamentally, to the volunta-
rists, all law is the product of a single source: the will of single, individual
states. Consequently, there can be no fundamental diff erence between na-
tional and international law.
A leading early fi gure of the voluntarist persuasion was Adolf Lasson. He
came from a Jewish family (named Lazarussohn) in Mecklenburg- Strelitz
but converted to Christianity and altered his surname. His university stud-
ies, at the University of Berlin, included philosophy and classical philology
as well as law. His teaching, too, was wide- ranging, including philosophy and
German literature. Expertise in the history of religion led to a major study of
the fourteenth- century German mystical fi gure Meister Eckhart— an inter-
est that accurately refl ected a strongly antirationalist philosophical outlook
on Lasson’s part.
Inspired by the German victories of the 1866 war against Austria, Lasson
published Princip und Zukunft des Völkerrechts (Principle and Future of In-
ternational Law) in 1871, the leading text of neo- Hegeliansim. In it, he denied
the existence of an international community in any meaningful sense. Inter-
national law, he maintained, can have no greater ambition than the adjust-
ment and coordination of the autonomous wills of the various individual
states. To the extent that states happen to share certain common objectives,
rules can readily be devised to further those goals, to introduce a mea sure of
order and predictability into the pro cess. But international law, he con-
tended, cannot dictate conduct to a state contrary to that state’s will. “Th e
state,” he asserted, “can... never submit to a legal order, nor, in fact, to any