Shadows across the Path 465Natural Law
Th e tenacity of natural law is one of the great testaments to the continuity
of the human intellectual experience. No line of thought made a greater
contribution to the development of international law— even if the positiv-
ists had little hesitation about kicking away the ladder once their fore-
bears had climbed it. Since the nineteenth century, natural law had been
relegated to the margins of the international legal scene. But it found a
doughty champion in the late twentieth century in the form of Philip Al-
lott of Cambridge University. In the manner of Le Fur, Allott harked back
to the medieval rationalists— and (in spirit at least) even further, to the
ancient stoics. His principal work, entitled Eunomia: New Order for a
New World (1990), was aptly described by Koskenniemi as “unabashedly
nonmodern.”
A strongly rationalistic, speculative focus gives Allott’s work an affi nity to
that of Pufendorf and Wolff. Th e book begins, in good Euclidean fashion,
with the setting out of four basic propositions. One of these is the assertion
that “international law is the law of the society of the whole human race and
of the society of all societies.” In the classic natural- law tradition, the hu-
man species is treated as a single great society or moral community. Not
surprisingly, Allott has been contemptuous of the positivist picture of inter-
national law as merely governing relations between states.
Allott’s self- proclaimed task has been to craft “a general theory of society
and law which is potentially universal.” Making no more than token ges-
tures to readability, he has sought to combine the intellectual coherence and
comprehensiveness of Kelsen with the social- science perspective of McDou-
gal. He paints a picture of consciousness as the driving force of human his-
tory in general and even speaks of “consciousness- creating- consciousness”—a
sort of chain of development of ever- advancing collective mental stages at-
tained, over time, by the human race. Like so many natural- law writers be-
fore him, he is a strong supporter of the principle of the natural sociability of
the human species, looking forward to the time when international law will
refl ect and embody the imperatives of humanity as a whole instead of “the
self- determined interests of so- called states.”
Th is line of thought is reminiscent of the ideas of the French theologian
and phi los o pher Teilhard de Chardin, who set out a grandiose scheme of