Sovereignty, Pluralism, and Regular War: Wolff and Vattel’s Enlightenment Critique of Just War

Political Theory 46 (2):218-241 (2018)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Since its early origins, just war discourse has had two contrasting functions: it has sought to speak law and morals to power, and thus to restrain the use of force, but it has also served to authorize and legitimize the use of force. Critical voices have recently alerted to the increasing use of authorization and legitimization in a broader context of hegemonic and unilateral appropriations of just war discourse. In this article, I show that such critiques of just war have a long history, and reconstruct the powerful challenge that two of the foremost international jurists of the Enlightenment—Christian Wolff and Emer de Vattel—mounted against early modern accounts of just war. Their neglected theory of “regular war” helps us to recover a sense of what a truly pluralist and anti-hegemonic doctrine of ius ad bellum may look like, and reveals a deep tension in the just war tradition between the criteria of political authority and just cause.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

More on regular and decomposable ultrafilters in ZFC.Paolo Lipparini - 2010 - Mathematical Logic Quarterly 56 (4):340-374.
Tribal sovereignty and the intercultural public sphere.Michael Rabinder James - 1999 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 25 (5):57-86.
Law and sovereignty.Pavlos Eleftheriadis - 2010 - Law and Philosophy 29 (5):535-569.
About the Impossibility of Absolute State Sovereignty: The Early Years.Jorge Emilio Núñez - 2014 - International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique 27 (4):645-664.
Sovereignty and the return of the repressed.Wendy Brown - 2008 - In David Campbell & Morton Schoolman (eds.), The New Pluralism: William Connolly and the Contemporary Global Condition. Duke University Press. pp. 250--272.
Giorgio Agamben: sovereignty and life.Matthew Calarco & Steven DeCaroli (eds.) - 2007 - Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Analytics

Added to PP
2017-01-23

Downloads
14 (#846,877)

6 months
2 (#670,035)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references