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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS The Gentle Civilizer Of Nations : The Rise And Fall Of International Law 1870-1960 by Martti Koskenniemi
International law was born from the impulse to civilize late nineteenth-century attitudes towards race and society, argues Martti Koskenniemi in this extensive study of the rise and fall of modern international law. In a work of wide-ranging intellectual scope, now available for the first time in paperback, Koskenniemi traces the emergence of a liberal sensibility relating to international matters in the late nineteenth century, and its subsequent decline after the Second World War. He combines legal analysis, historical and political critique and semi-biographical studies of key figures including Hans Kelsen, Hersch Lauterpacht, Carl Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau; he also considers the role of crucial institutions the Institut de droit international, the League of Nations. His discussion of legal and political realism at American law schools ends in a critique of post-1960 instrumentalism. This book provides a unique reflection on the possibility of critical international law today.show more