Abstract

The article focuses on the overlooked volume of Henry Sumner Maine's corpus, the posthumously published International Law and uses it to respond to the general critical difficulty in establishing Maine's posture. Maine, of course, makes it difficult with the numerous contrapuntal moves of this book and others. For example, he strongly criticizes the predominant view of international law as an accretionary process of commentary by one theorist following another and yet he places tremendous value on Grotius, "whose works acted on the spirit of belligerency like a charm," and other early international legal theorists. He sees his contemporary environment as marked by increasing militarization, even of militarization of society during time of peace, while he describes the relative humanity of the present over the distant past.Ultimately, Maine is a realist who focuses on late nineteenth-century manuals of war rather than the idealism of the Anglo-American peace movement, and recognizes the importance of Czar Alexander II over any of nineteenth-century international legal theorists. If J.W. Burrow has identified social evolution as providing Victorians an "intellectual resting-place" between theoretical clarity and social diversity, Maine's broad social evolution allows him to mediate between the moral amelioration in international life and the practical realities of that life