60 Law and Morality Abroad (to ca. ad 1550)that other societies were to be evaluated according to how nearly they con-
formed to Chinese ways. It will be seen that much the same ethos prevailed
in the Islamic world, where the one body of law was held to govern the true
believers, with infi dels left to their own devices— and with no “master law”
governing both.
It has been observed that the stoic version of natural law, which had pre-
vailed in classical times, had been strongly organicist or animistic in char-
acter. Th at continued to be the case long into the Eu ro pe an Middle Ages. It
can readily be detected, for example, in the common medieval ideal of a
thoroughly integrated society— with an image of an organism as its leading
meta phor. Just as the various organs and tissues of a living creature are
united into a single, complex, cooperative system, so was the medieval so-
cial and po liti cal body seen to be made up of a great diversity of classes, oc-
cupations, skills, and so forth— all ultimately working together to produce
(ideally) a harmonious social system. Th is organic image of an integrated
and cooperative social order was set out most vividly in the twelft h century
by the En glish writer John of Salisbury, who likened the head of the body to
the prince, the heart to the senate, sensory organs to provincial governors,
the hands to soldiers and civilian offi cials, and the feet to agriculturalists
and craft smen. At about the time of John’s writing (in 1159), however, a
new conception of natural law— which we will designate as the rationalistic
one— was gaining ground and would be the dominant one for many centu-
ries to come.
Natural law was not, however, the sole set of universalist norms at work in
Eu ro pe an society— nor even, in practice, the most important one. Th ere
were two other bodies of law that were, so to speak, closer to the ground,
more closely connected to the everyday concerns of people in their social
lives. One of these was the ius gentium, an inheritance from ancient Rome.
Th e other was something called the ius commune, or “common law,” which
was a specifi cally medieval invention. It was basically an amalgam of Ro-
man law and the canon law of the Christian Church. From these sundry
conceptual raw materials, modern international law would (eventually)
emerge.