Dissident Voices 269held custom to be superior to treaties in being more fl exible. Custom, in his
opinion, is “an intermediate stage through which opinions or conceptions
ought almost always to pass, before assuming the form of enacted law.”
Of all the major international-law writers of the nineteenth century,
Lorimer stood most conspicuously apart. His Institutes reads like no other
legal treatise in its general or ga ni za tion and the extent of its philosophical
explorations. Th at his book exercised little infl uence will hardly come as a
surprise. At the same time, though, he was not isolated or shunned by other
lawyers, but, on the contrary, was an active participant in professional ac-
tivities. His acute analytical mind was much respected, even if the par tic u-
lar path that he blazed attracted no fellow explorers.
Liberalism
Of the heterodoxical approaches to international law, liberalism was the least
well expounded in the nineteenth century. No single treatise set it out in a
systematic fashion, nor was any single professional lawyer strongly identifi ed
with it. Th e reason is that it was not (and never has been) a doctrine of inter-
national law per se, but rather a general philosophy of economics and politics
with important implications for international law. Only in the twentieth
century would liberalism blossom into something like a school of interna-
tional law. But its foundations were solidly laid during the present period.
Liberalism had— and retains to this day— strong affi nities with natural
law, in that it was based on a set of very general propositions about human
society. Society was seen as fundamentally harmonious. Th is harmony
arose, on the liberal view, not out of a natural sociability of individual per-
sons. Instead, it arose out of a belief that, in a society in which the powers of
government were strictly limited, and in which freedom of individuals was
correspondingly large, an “invisible hand” (in the famous phrase of Adam
Smith) would guide those individuals into the most suitable, and produc-
tive, areas of activity— ultimately to the maximum benefi t of the society at
large. Th is picture was a sort of social counterpart of the Newtonian con-
ception of celestial mechanics.
Central to this liberal vision— and indeed at the very defi nitional heart of
it— was a belief in, and commitment to, the empowerment of individuals at