Dissident Voices 261
positivists. To the liberals, the principal focus was on individuals. Th e nation-
ality school concentrated on nations or cultural units, instead of on states, as
the fundamental units of international law. And fi nally, for the solidarists, the
dominant unit was the international community as a whole.
At the same time, though, none of the three new approaches rejected
positivism in its entirety. All of them were compatible with important as-
pects of it. Th ey should therefore be regarded not as full- scale alternatives to
positivism, but instead as shift s in emphasis, as attempts to harness specifi c
aspects of positivism in the cause of reform. In general, the disputes between
the schools were mea sured and polite— probably more so than those between
the partisans of the voluntarist and common-will versions of positivism.
Conspicuous public feuds and intemperate denunciations were not, for the
most part, features of international legal debate. International law attracted,
on the whole, a rather genteel crowd— a feature that remains true today to a
surprising extent.
Th e Tenacity of Natural Law
For all of the forcefulness of their attacks, the positivists of the nineteenth
century never succeeded in wholly eradicating natural law, even if they did
keep it on a tight leash. It should be recalled that positivism did not, strictly
speaking, require the denial of the existence of natural law— it merely de-
nied it the status of law in the true sense. Even the staunchest positivist
could therefore accept natural law as a possible source of inspiration in the
making of international law. A second role that was conceded to natural
law, even by positivist writers, was as the law controlling relations between
advanced Eu ro pe an states and the “savage” states of the far parts of the
world— a matter that will be considered in due course.
In addition, even the most rigorously scientifi c of positivists could hardly
claim their own system to be wholly value- free. It was very diffi cult— and
perhaps impossible— to imagine even a mainstream positivist system being
viable without at least some kind of shared value system underpinning it.
Th e shared values, to be sure, might be extremely few in number, as they were
for Hobbes. But doing away with them altogether was no easy matter. In this
connection, it will be recalled that the neo- Kantian version of positivism was