Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T02:25:06.901Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Confronting Difference: The Puzzling Durability of Gentili’s Combination of Pragmatic Pluralism and Normative Judgment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2017

Benedict Kingsbury
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Editorial Comments
Information
American Journal of International Law , Volume 92 , Issue 4 , October 1998 , pp. 713 - 723
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 The Centro Internazionale di Studi Gentiliani in San Ginesio marked the anniversary with two academic meetings, and is working with scholars at several Italian universities to produce a new edition of De jure belli, with a new Italian translation to supplant Antonio Fiorini's Del Diritto di guerra di Alberico Gentili: Traduxione e discorso (1877). This Comment uses the more familiar “jure” and “jus” rather than the original “hire” and “ius.”

2 See Philip Allott, Eutopia: The Return of the Ideal (forthcoming). A new Journal of the History of International Law is shortly to begin publication.

3 A judicious and carefully researched biography and appraisal is Gezina van der Molen, Alberico Gentili and the Development of International Law: His life work and times (2d ed. 1968) (1937).

4 De Legationibus libri tres (photo, reprint 1594 ed., with translation by Gordon J. Laing, Carnegie Classics 1924) (1585) [hereinafter DL]; De Jure belli libri tres (photo, reprint 1612 ed., with translation by John C. Rolfe, Carnegie Classics 1933) (1598) [hereinafter JB]; Hispanicae Advocationis libri duo (photo, reprint 1661 ed., with translation by Frank Frost Abbott, Carnegie Classics 1921) (1613). De legationibus was reprinted in English translation in 1997, with a short introduction by John Yoo. Also of interest is De Armis romanis et injustitia beluuca romanorum libri II, in Alberici Gentilis, Opera omnia (Naples, Gravier 1770) (1599).

5 See Thomas Erskine Holland, Alberico Gentili, in Studies in International Law 1 (1898). See also Peter Haggenmacher, Grotius and Gentili: A Reassessment of Thomas E. Holland's Inaugural Lecture, in Hugo Grotius and International Relations 133 (Hedley Bull, Benedict Kingsbury & Adam Roberts eds., 1990).

6 On 18th-century views of Gentili, see Haggenmacher, supra note 5, at 134–38.

7 The revival of interest in Gentili in 1874–1898 is considered in Holland, supra note 5, Appendix IX, at 37–39. Surveying Italian attitudes toward Gentili from the Risorgimento onward, Panizza chronicles successive acclaim for Gentili as patriotic anticleric, philosopher of peace, and embodiment of Italian nationalism. Diego Panizza, Appunti sulla storia della fortuna di Alberico Gentili, 5 Il Pensiero Politico 373 (1972). Gentili's place in the wider history of international law owes much to Holland's inaugural Oxford lecture in 1874, supra, and his scholarly edition of De jure belli (1877), as well as to the indefatigable James Brown Scott's superintendence of the Carnegie Endowment's Classics of International Law.

8 Peter Haggenmacher, Grotius et la Doctrine de la guerre juste (1983). See also Peter Haggenmacher, On Assessing the Grotian Heritage, in International Law and the Grotian Heritage 150 (T.M.C. Asser Instituut, 1985).

9 See Daniel Coquillette, Legal Ideology and Incorporation: The English Civilians, 1523–1607, 61 Boston U. L. Rev. 1, 54–63 (1981).

10 JB, supra note 4, bk. I, ch. 3.

11 See David Kennedy, New Approaches to Comparative Law: Comparativism and Governance, Utah L. Rev. 545, 560, 568–80 (1997).

12 See, e.g., J. H. Elliot, The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (1970); and Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (1997). A few examples may illustrate the point. Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) remarked that China's government and arts surpassed “ours” in many excellent features. Michel de Montaigne, On Experience, in Essays 352 (J. M. Cohen trans., Penguin 1958) (1595). Gentili's brilliant contemporary from Macerata, the Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci, saw Chinese calligraphy in 1582 and immediately realized that ideograms might provide a much better means than Latin for universal communication. Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci 21 (1984). José de Acosta, author of one of the most influential 16th-century European works on the Americas, endeavored to compare Native Americans and European peasants, and Chinese and Mexican government. The impact of Acosta's Historia Natural y moral de las Indias (J. Alcina Franch ed., 1987) (1590), is discussed, e.g., in Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man 161–65 (2d ed. 1986).

13 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970).

14 The case for the importance of Montaigne's position is made by Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (1993). See also J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy 37–100 (1998).

15 2 Michel de Montaigne, Apologie de Raimond Sebond, in The Essays of Michael Lord of Montaigne 297 (John Florio trans., J. M. Dent 1924) (1580/1584).

16 Montaigne, On Experience, supra note 12, at 353.

17 Schneewind, supra note 14, at 51, discusses Montaigne's condemnation of lies, torture and witch burning. See also Nancy Struever, Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance 182–209 (1992).

18 For Grotius, a law of nature is one that can be shown to agree with a rational and social nature. His methodology brought to the natural law tradition what has come to be called the New Science of Law and Morality.

19 Tuck, supra note 14, at 347. The impact of this Grotian approach is discussed in Benedict Kingsbury, A Grotian Tradition of Theory and Practice?: Grotius, Law, and Moral Skepticism in the Thought of Hedley Bull, 17 Quinnipiac L. Rev. 3 (1997).

20 See, e.g., Guido Astuti, Mos italicus e mos gallicus nei dialoghi “De iuris interpretibus” di Alberico Gentili (1937).

21 Gentili's choice and assessment of examples is one of the grounds on which Grotius criticizes him. Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis libri tres, Prolegomena, para. 38 (photo, reprint 1646 ed., with translation by Francis W. Kelsey, Carnegie Classics 1913/1925) (1625).

22 Pufendorf was later to attack Grotius for proposing to base natural law on consensus, realizing that such a proposal concedes in practice to the objections of die skeptics. Samuel Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations [De jure naturae et gentium], bk. II, ch. iii, §7 (Basil Kennet trans., 4th ed., London, J. Walthoe 1729).

23 Diego Panizza, Alberico Gentili, Giurista ideologo nell' Inghilterra elisabettiana (1981), and Diego Panizza, Alberico Gentili: vicenda umana e intellettuale di un giurista italiano nell'Inghilterra elisabettiana, in Alberico Gentili: Giurista e intellettuale globale 31 (1988), assesses Gentili's struggles with the puritan extremism of John Rainolds and others in Oxford in the 1580s and 1590s.

24 JB, supra note 4, bk. I, ch. 10.

25 Id., ch. 9.

26 Id., ch. 11.

27 Alberico Gentili, Regales discursus tres (Helmstedt, Johanes Heitmuller 1669) (first published as Regales disputationes, 1605). Of particular relevance are De potentate regis absoluta, id. at 1, esp. 26–28; and De vi civium in regem semper injusta, id. at 77.

28 JB, supra note 4, bk. III, ch. 11.

29 Id., bk. I, ch. 14.

30 Id., bk. III, ch. 9.

31 Id., bk. I, ch. 10.

32 Joel Cornette, Le Roi de guerre 119–76 (1993). See also Anthony Carry, Japanese Deconstructions of the Grotian Tradition in International Law, 66 Brit. Y.B. Int'l L. 477 (1995).

33 Gentili makes reference to the standard Stoic and Ciceronian accounts, in which the closest bonds are among friends and family, then among the inhabitants of the city, then among the people of the particular state, and finally there are diffuse bonds in the great society of humankind. JB, supra note 4, bk. I, ch. 15. But he does not really contribute to the philosophical development of the idea.

34 See Hedley Bull, The Grotian Conception of International Society, in Diplomatic Investigations 51 (Herbert Butterfield & Martin Wight eds., 1966).

35 See generally Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (1977).

36 DL, supra note 4, bk. II, ch. 11.

37 JB, supra note 4, bk. I, ch. 4.

38 Id., ch. 3.

39 Haggenmacher, supra note 5, at 173.

40 JB, supra note 4, bk. I, ch. 2.

41 Id., ch. 14.

42 Gentili accurately notes, for instance, that China confined trade by Europeans to just a few port cities, and he holds that this practice is entirely lawful. Id., ch. 19. He regards it as beyond doubt that there is a land connection between the extreme east of Europe and the Americas, suggesting an ancient connection between the people of the New World and those of Europe. Id. This accurate conjecture supported a belief in the common origins of Europeans and American Indians, and was very important in refuting arguments that the Indians were not human beings in the same way as Europeans.

43 See Spence, supra note 12, at 1–58.

44 JB, supra note 4, bk. I, ch. 12.

45 See Robert Williams, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought 194–200 (1990). A similar argument is made about Vitoria in Antony Anghie, Francisco de Vitoria and the Colonial Origins of International Law, 5 Soc. & Legal Stud. 321 (1996).

46 JB, supra note 4, bk. I, ch. 25.

47 Such views remain a source of conflict, as with Indian groups in Mexico and elsewhere in the Americas who argue that neoliberal trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement force them into world markets that confer few benefits while undermining their cultures and economies.

48 JB, supra note 4, bk. I, ch. 19.

49 Id., bk. II, ch. 24 & bk. III, ch. 9.

50 Id., bk. I, ch. 12.

51 Charles Henry Alexandrowicz, Introduction to van der Molen, supra note 3, at viii. See also Gezina van der Molen, Alberico Gentili and the Universality of International Law, 13 Indian Y.B. World Aff., pt. II, at 33 (1964); and Onuma Yasuaki, Conclusion, in A Normative Approach to War: Peace, War, and Justice in Hugo Grotius 369 (Onuma Yasuaki ed., 1993).

52 JB, supra note 4, bk. III, ch. 9.

53 Id., bk. I, chs. 12, 25.

54 The requerimiento is discussed in Pagden, supra note 12.

55 See Anthony Pagden, Dispossessing the Barbarian: Rights and Property in Spanish America, in Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination 13, 33 (1990).

56 For a useful discussion, see Barbara Arneil, The Wild Indian's Venison: Locke's Theory of Property and English Colonialism in America, 44 Pol. Stud. 60 (1996). Gentili endorsed the view that die world's many areas of unoccupied land, including vast tracts in Turkey, Africa and the New World, may be occupied by those in need of land, but held that the new occupants must accept the sovereignty of the existing ruler of the territory. JB, supra note 4, bk. I, ch. 17.