The Quest for World Order and Human Dignity in the Twenty-first Century: Constitutive Process and Individual Commitment
Given the breadth, sophistication, and idiosyncrasy, of this collection of lectures it should be treated as a general, but not introductory, analysis of public international law and will be attractive to scholars of the theory of international law. It is situated somewhere between a textbook covering core topics in international law and a collection of the author’s essays. As a consequence Reisman provides us with components of a theory of public international law but not the sustained and unified analysis we might expect of a monograph. As such it could be judged by two standards: whether it is synoptic enough to be a good survey and coherent enough to be considered a theory. As a survey Reisman’s book is usefully wide-ranging and consistently analytical but it is by no means comprehensive or systematic. As a theory, it should be seen as an interesting contribution to the New Haven School of international legal study, but a contribution that exposes the difficulties of finding normative unity within international law even using a principle as malleable as human dignity. It is, nonetheless, more than the sum of its parts and the distinctive character, and many incisive moments, of the work make it an attractive text. The New Haven School was, and is, a critical school of international law and politics offering an immanent critique of international law. International law must be assumed to be the law of a society if it is to be law at all. That society has functions, policies, goals, and values that can be disaggregated into the values of the individuals that inhabit them. These basic interests or values include ‘enlightenment’, ‘well being’, and ‘respect’ and can, in turn, be distilled into the idea of human dignity, sometimes meaning the sum of these values, sometime meaning a harmonious relationship between individuals and the system as a whole (a