Dissident Voices 297Th e fi rst detailed and systematic pre sen ta tion of the case for the lawful-
ness of hu ma nita ria n inter vent ion was by a lit t le- k now n French law yer na med
Antoine Rougier, of the law faculty of the University of Caen, in 1910. He
explicitly based his argument on an appeal to what he expressly called “a fun-
damental law of po liti cal societies, the law of solidarity.” In addition, he in-
voked what he called a “common law of humanity.” He advanced the idea
of what he called a “human law,” which he candidly conceded to be closely re-
lated to natural law. Among his intellectual forebears, he named Duguit.
Rougier was sensitive to possible abuse of this asserted right of intervention. To
deal with that problem, he proposed, like Arntz, that humanitarian interven-
tion could be exercised only on a collective, not a unilateral, basis. He was also
careful to specify that the right is based on necessity, meaning that its purpose
is to relieve the suff erings of victims of oppression rather than to punish the
oppressors.
Th e lawfulness of humanitarian intervention continues to be one of the
most hotly debated issues of international law. Writers in the solidarist tra-
dition, such as Arntz and Rougier, in supporting it, reveal themselves as the
intellectual ancestors of what would later be called liberal interventionism—
the policy of infringing the sovereignty of states for a noble end. But solidar-
ism’s ideas swept much more broadly than this one issue. In the pre- 1914
period, only the early glimmerings of solidarist approaches appeared. In the
case of writers like St.- Simon or Alberdi, the dreams were too extravagant to
gain support. Even more sober legal minds such as La Pradelle or Rougier
were too far out of the positivist legal mainstream to exert much infl uence.
In the course of time, though, solidarism would become one of the major
wings of international legal thought. But the present period off ered only
tantalizing hints of that future greatness.