This chapter explores the Histories’ interest in human nature on the battlefield in terms of valour. It reviews instances in which the historical actors – including Pixodarus, Xerxes, and Themistocles – foreground the strategic importance of "surpassing nature." This is a motif that places the speakers in a network of sophistic and later, Platonic, theories on man’s desire to outstrip his own nature. At stake is a philosophy of "superior nature" that is strongly undercut by the complexity of the action on the battlefield.

This chapter surveys the evidence for the sophistic debate on relativism as evident in the fragments of the sophists, including comic and tragic poets. A widespread interpretation of the Histories claims that Herodotus supports nomos without qualification. By contrast, this chapter argues that this claim fails to capture the complexity of Herodotus’ engagement with those figures who use nomos as a rhetorical ploy to justify what is contrary to popular ethics. Similarly, Presocratic thinkers were working through the challenges presented by those who identified nomos as only a relative set of values as opposed to an objective norm to be followed. The Histories’ exploration of the problem of relating custom and law to justice takes place in the context of the rise and expansion of Persian imperialism. Further, it implicates the despot in a relativizing of justice and constitutes a key explanatory paradigm in the Persian attack against the Greek mainland in the Greco-Persian Wars.

The assassination of the False Smerdis in Book 3 and the ensuing constitutional uncertainty offer Herodotus an inflection point to pause and consider the institution of monarchy in Persia in terms of its strengths and weaknesses. This chapter reexamines the speeches given by the conspirators in advance of the coup and its aftermath. In these episodes, Darius undermines a key nomos held by the Persians, their abhorrence of falsehood. Darius does so as a private citizen but given his subsequent rise to the throne, this invites comparison with the Great Kings. Darius’ disregard for nomos opens a philosophical debate on human motivation and self-interest. In a speech to the Persian conspirators, the future monarch defends "egoism," the philosophy that all action is performed to maximize the individual’s self-interest. This view is set alongside orations by the Persians Otanes and Prexaspes, exponents of cooperative action and altruism, respectively. The chapter argues that fifth-century intellectual culture engaged in a spirited interrogation of the individual in relation to self-interest, often in terms of the social contract. The clash between motivation on behalf of the one versus the many will illustrate the complex negotiation in Persia of ruler and ruled, self and society.

This chapter discusses the conceptual foundations of the notion of social justice during the Enlightenment before surveying the volume’s achievement in historicizing twentieth-century European proposals. Social justice presupposed the invention of the “social,” in and through the insight into informal cultural and institutional ordering. And while social justice was coined earlier in the nineteenth century, the concept became unavoidable later in the century as both left liberals and Roman Catholics responded to individuals and laissez-faire, in part by innovating a new ‘social science’. This chapter concludes by speculating about the future trajectory of claims on the notion of social justice.

Glanvill is the supposed author of this treatise on the laws and customs of England, a work that was a twelfth-century precursor to the legal compendium of Bracton, composed in the thirteenth century. Glanvill introduces the concept of law and justice and explains the different Latin legal terms, many drawn from contemporary French, in use at the time and the different legal procedures that had developed since the Conquest.

This chapter discusses how international alw is made, and how it can be iendtified

The relation between the opening section of Plato’s Laws and Xenophon’s Constitution of the Lacedaemonians usually goes unnoticed. I draw attention to its importance for understanding Plato’s project in the dialogue. Section 1 shows that the view proposed by Plato’s Athenian Visitor that Lycurgus made virtue in its entirety the goal of his statecraft was anticipated in Xenophon’s treatise. It has to be treated as an interpretation of the Spartan politeia alternative to that advanced by the Athenian’s interlocutors, which Plato could hope to be taken seriously as such. The second section focuses on the legislative programme the Athenian says he had hoped to hear ascribed to the Cretan and Spartan lawgivers. Plato can expect recognition by the reader that the programme is properly Spartan and Cretan by virtue of its echoes of the programme attributed to Lycurgus by Xenophon. The third section argues that in making law primarily concerned with fostering the proper development, conduct, and treatment of human beings at every stage of the life cycle, above all by provision for sound customary practices and the like, Plato adopts the approach to law making taken by Xenophon’s Lycurgus.

Chapter six opens onto a tense confrontation that led the Spanish colonies in the New Kingdom the edge of civil war. As the colonial ideal of two ethnically-pure “republics” for Spaniards and for Indians had already begun to fracture, two indigenous communities identified the mestizo (mixed-ethnicity) sons of indigenous noblewomen as rightful successors to their outgoing caciques (indigenous chieftains). This decision inadvertently set off a chain of events that led to two decades of legal and political challenges. Through analysis of a cluster of legal cases involving aspiring caciques who were legitimate mestizo inheritors according to indigenous custom, this chapter explores the different bodies of law that informed Crown magistrates and administrators as they divided human communities and assigned their human subjects to categories and spaces. Here I also pay close attention to the legal implications of the rhetoric employed by different social factions as the legal cases in the colonies made their way to the Council of the Indies in Spain.

Quentin Skinner offers a powerful new interpretation of Hobbes’ understanding of time, and its implications for Christian belief and for politics. For Hobbes time is merely a subjective experience of continual succession. It follows that the Christian view of eternity as a state of timelessness must be a mistake, since there can be no such state. A further consequence is that the orthodox view of the Last Judgement must likewise be mistaken. It makes no sense to think of the saved living timelessly in heaven after the Second Coming; the only possibility is that they will live endlessly on earth. Hobbes also explores two political implications of his understanding of time. One is that, if time is mere succession, it cannot have any normative significance. The Common Law view that custom can make law is thus put in question. Hobbes also discounts the political significance of learning how to act with timeliness, offering instead a view of statecraft as a matter of following rules. The chapter ends by asking whether Hobbes succeeds in presenting a coherent criticism of the view – prominent in classical and Renaissance thought – that in politics it is essential to learn how to seize opportunities.

George Garnett explores the roles of time and history in English Common Law, and how they gave the Common Law its political salience. He begins by picking apart F.W. Maitland’s celebrated contrast between the ‘logic of evidence’, deemed to be characteristic of historical understanding, and the ‘logic of authority’, deemed to be characteristic of legal understanding. Celebrated as this statement has been, Garnett contends that the almost – but crucially not quite – antithetical relationship has never been properly understood, and that it rests in part on Maitland’s misunderstanding of how legal development and continuity worked in the period before judicial precedent became central, in the late sixteenth century. The chapter is therefore concerned both with Maitland and with the peculiar problems encountered in tracing legal development and continuity in a system which was primarily customary rather than statutory. By extension, Garnett considers the implications for explaining the use of English legal history in political thinking, particularly in the seventeenth century. Emphasis is laid on Maitland’s distaste for Sir Edward Coke, then as now, the most influential Common Law jurist.

The Introduction outlines how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel and its representations of social change and individual and collective life in nineteenth-century Britain. The study contends that nineteenth-century novelists found in fashion a temporal model for conceptualizing a heightened sense of the evanescence of modernity and the cycle of novelty and obsolescence that produced it. The Introduction traces fashion’s transformations back to the consumer revolution and new media of the eighteenth century, and shows how fashion’s integration with visual culture in the nineteenth century led to a new consciousness of visibility and celebrity. The Introduction develops a theoretical framework for analyzing fashion’s relationship to history and the present, and its unique role in stitching individual identity and self-expression to social and public life. Taking its cue from novels that engaged with the temporality of fashion, the Introduction also provides a revisionist account of the history of the novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The starting point for discussion and analysis of the sources of international law is almost invariably art 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice (‘ICJ Statute’), the International Court of Justice being the primary judicial organ of the United Nations. Article 38 lists the sources of international law as comprising treaties, custom, general principles of law, and – as subsidiary means for determining the law – judicial decisions and academic writing. However, in the 75 years since the adoption of the ICJ Statute, newer sources of legal obligation have emerged for the international community. These often involve non-state and intergovernmental actors in their creation. This chapter explores both the traditional and newer sources of international law and assesses how they are adopted and created.

When Hamlet instructs Gertrude to “assume a virtue if you have it not,” since “use almost can change the stamp of nature,” his counsel echoes Aristotelian ethical concepts such as “nature” and “habit” (hexis). Those concepts supplied terms used in English Protestant pastoral guidance but took on new freight given Reformation revaluations of human effort. By 1600, religious concerns – the fallen person’s capacity to perform virtuous acts, the relationship between inward disposition and outward appearance – put pressure on Aristotelian ideas. Protestant clergy rejected Aristotle’s teaching on habit because it made virtue the result of human effort and yet their recommendations for devotional practice called for the cultivation of dispositional habits in all but name. While habit as formation of character finds little representation on stage, since drama rarely shows the slow formation of character, Hamlet’s preoccupation with custom allows us to listen in on someone thinking about what the springs of action and change are, in terms fully alive to the public discourse of late Elizabethan England, and the pastoral inflection he places on hexis shows us how an inherited ethical idea can take on a fresh livery in Shakespeare’s plays.

What is international law, and how is it different from domestic (national) law?  This chapter provides an answer to those questions and introduces other foundational concepts in international law such as opinio juris, sovereignty, and the state. We trace the development of international law from Western/European perspectives and discuss how international law was often experienced as oppression and violence in the non-Western world. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the classic sources of international law: customs, treaties, general principles of law, judicial decisions, and scholarly writings, each of which is presented in some detail.

This book tells the story of the formation of a new field of knowledge. It shows how various authors combined their knowledge, experience, and critical thought to write lawbooks that made various disparate customs into a field of knowledge known as customary law. These authors wrote texts, known as the coutumiers in the French legal tradition, in thirteenth-century northern France. ‘Customary law’ typically refers to a type of rule made in practice, and in the courts, by the community, which can include ‘the people’ in some form, lords and kings, or lawyers and judges. Customs concerning specific rules of property, succession, and other subjects certainly emerged out of this oral practice. Coutumier authors, however, successfully crafted customary law into an expository genre of writing, one that took ideas of custom from practical experience and different forms of book learning and transformed them into bodies of customary law.