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The Last Treatise: Project and Person. (Reflections on Martti Koskenniemi's From Apology to Utopia)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

David Kennedy

Extract

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Martti Koskenniemi's From Apology to Utopia is the most significant late 20th century English language monograph in the field of international law, and it is terrific to see it re-issued. The book offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of the doctrinal materials and intellectual history of the discipline. It became an instant classic in the analysis of law's rhetorical structures, and it could well turn out to have been the last great original treatise in the international law field. It both synthesized the materials and demonstrated the impossibility of their being synthesized in a stable and intellectually coherent fashion. The treat in this re-issued edition is Martti's new epilogue. In it, he reflects on what he was seeking to achieve in ways that will open the text to new readings while remaining, I think, true to the spirit of the initial project.

Type
Articles: Special Issue
Information
German Law Journal , Volume 7 , Issue 12: Special issue - From Apology to Utopia: A Symposium , 01 December 2006 , pp. 982 - 992
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

1 I make this assessment with apologies to many friends and colleagues. I was tempted to fudge – “one of the most significant”– but decided to stick to my guns. Comparable efforts to integrate, criticize and reimagine the field are hard to identify. There are numerous major works of synthesis and integration – Brierly, Cassese, Lauterpacht, Rosenne, Schwarzenberg, Sorensen, Verdross or de Visscher come to mind, and must have been models for From Apology to Utopia. In the postwar era, there were several efforts to reimagine the discipline and offer it a new intellectual foundation – Clark/Sohn, Falk, Franck, Friedmann, Henkin, Jessup may have been the most noteworthy. There were also other works of criticism – Carty, Chimni, or my own International Legal Structures (1986). But for root and branch re-thinking on this scale, I think we would need to go back to Kelsen or McDougal in mid-century.Google Scholar

2 Kennedy, David, International Legal Structures (1987).Google Scholar

3 Kennedy, David, 31 Harvard International Law Journal 385 (1990) (reviewing Martti Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument, (1989)).Google Scholar

4 Koskenniemi, Martti, From Apology to Utopia, the Structure of International Legal Argument, Reissue with a new Epilogue, 565 (2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Koskenniemi, Martti, From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument, 48 (1989).Google Scholar

6 Id.Google Scholar

7 Kennedy, David, International Legal Structures (1987).Google Scholar

8 Supra, note 4 at 565.Google Scholar

9 Supra, note 4 at 589.Google Scholar

10 Id., at 606–607.Google Scholar