Breaking with the Past 239will outside of itself. Th e state that prevails between states is therefore a
completely lawless one.”
Another pioneering fi gure in the voluntarist school of thought was a Bal-
tic German named Carl Bergbohm. As a native of Riga in Latvia, from a
merchant family, he was a subject of the Rus sian Empire. He was educated at
the University of Dorpat (or Tartu), in Estonia, where he became an associ-
ate professor. Of all of the nineteenth- century positivists, he was probably
the most forceful and dogmatic in his hostility to natural law. He could
see— and denounce—natural- law tendencies in even some of the unlikeliest
writers, including Hefft er and even Austin himself. As a dogged controver-
sialist, he made a number of enemies. But he made an early impression in
the fi eld of international law, when his master’s dissertation was published
in 1877 as Staatsverträge und Gesetze als Quellen des Völkerrechts (State Trea-
ties and Laws as Sources of International Law). Th is book strongly pressed
the thesis of state will as the basis of international law— with that will ex-
pressed most prominently in the form of treaties. Consistently with this
stance, he regarded multilateral treaties as the principal means for develop-
ing a body of general international law— though even that general law must
be limited in its application to states that are actually parties to the treaties
in question.
Later in his career, in 1895, Bergbohm moved to the University of Bonn,
which became a bastion of neo- Hegelianism. Its leading fi gure was Philipp
Zorn. Originally from Bavaria, and the son of a pastor, he taught law at the
Universities of Bern and Königsberg, before moving to Bonn in 1900. Zorn
had admirers in high places, becoming a legal adviser to German Kaiser
William II, as well as tutor to the crown prince in the subjects of constitu-
tional and canon law. In due course, Zorn was succeeded by his son Albert
as the leading fi gure in the Bonn School.
Th e great hope of the neo- Hegelians, though, in the early twentieth
century was an energetic and ambitious German scholar named Erich
Kaufmann. In 1912, he became a professor of law at the University of Kiel.
Much would be heard of him, in various voices, over the coming years. But in
his earliest phase, he was “the most uncompromising of the Hegelians.” He
was a disciple of Gierke, to whom he dedicated his fi rst major academic
work in 1911, on the subject of the right of states to repudiate treaties when
they ceased to serve the function originally intended by their parties.