[Rabkin, Jeremy, A., Law without Nations? Why Constitutional Government Requires Sovereign States, Princeton University Press, 2007, Paperback edition, $19.95. ISBN13: 978-0-691-13055-2

Rabkin, Jeremy A., The Case for Sovereignty: Why the World Should Welcome American Independence, The AEI Press, Publisher for the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C., 2004. Hardcover edition, $25.00, ISBN: 0844741833]

El sueño de la razón produce monstrous

Capricho nº 43, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes

A.  Introduction as a Disclaimer

It would be far too easy for a jurist educated in Europe to mount a case against these two successive books by Jeremy Rabkin, professor of Government at Cornell University, and dismiss the whole as a crystal-clear exponent of the application of a far-rightist American nationalist ideology to international law. It would suffice to cobble together some of the numerous bold quotations that abound in both works to dispatch the author as just another neo-conservative scholarly pamphleteer sprung from the always suspicious American Enterprise Institute. To gut, however, the beast’s bully to quench a scholarly readership’s avid thirst for neo-conservative blood or, otherwise, capturing her into a voyeuristic complicity, would not merely require this reviewer to act as an intellectual butcher (sic), but would, furthermore, contribute to propagate, a (false?) sense of certitude on other perspectives of international law.

I will, therefore, present the author’s neo-conservative defence of the United States’ sovereignty by attempting to soften the impact of the most rhetorically aggressive aspects embedded in his books. Playing along with the author’s occasional rhetorical strident spiral risked obscuring far more scholarly substantive considerations dealing with the framing of his work within a specific contemporary doctrinal trend. To categorise Rabkin’s work in the untouchable category by stressing the aspects of its partisan political rhetoric could also gratuitously reinforce the accursed fame that neo-conservative legal scholars enjoy within their own academy. Approaching Rabkin’s scholarship with lack of animosity does, moreover, offer additional possibilities for analysis than to simply add another chapter to the inflation of “hegemonic international...