This book provides a comprehensive introduction to global legal thought. It argues that economic globalization and digitalization have induced significant insecurity about the future of human social organization. While traditional international law as a system based on the consent of national states is in the process of rapid adaptation to its new social preconditions, a variety of transnational regulatory levels compete for legal authority. In this process of change, there is more need than ever to guide the theoretical understanding because academic concepts have a crucial influence on the emerging practice of global law. This book highlights which choices are available and argues that global law requires taking a stand in mutually irreconcilable choices.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to global legal thought. It argues that economic globalization and digitalization have induced significant insecurity about the future of human social organization. While traditional international law as a system based on the consent of national states is in the process of rapid adaptation to its new social preconditions, a variety of transnational regulatory levels compete for legal authority. In this process of change, there is more need than ever to guide the theoretical understanding because academic concepts have a crucial influence on the emerging practice of global law. This book highlights which choices are available and argues that global law requires taking a stand in mutually irreconcilable choices.

For many centuries, thinkers have tried to understand and to conceptualize political and legal order beyond the boundaries of sovereign territories. Their concepts, deeply entangled with ideas of theology, state formation, and human nature, form the bedrock of todays theoretical discourses on international law. This volume engages with models of early international legal thought from Machiavelli to Hegel before international law in the modern sense became an academic discipline of its own. The interplay of system and order serves as a leitmotiv throughout the book, helping to link historical models to contemporary discourse. Part I of the book covers a diverse collection of thinkers in order to scrutinize and contextualize their respective models of the international realm in light of general legal and political philosophy. Part II maps the historical development of international legal thought more generally by distilling common themes and ideas, such as the relationship between universality and particularity, the role of the state, the influence of power and economic interests on the law, and the contingencies of time, space and technical opportunities. In the current political climate, where it appears that the reinvigorated concept of the nation state as an ordering force competes with internationalist thinking, the problems at issue in the classic theories point to contemporary questions: is an international system without central power possible? How can a normative order come about if there is no central force to order relations between states? These essays show that uncovering the history of international law can offer ways in which to envisage its future.