The Advantage of Treaties: International Law in the Enlightenment

Abstract

In A Treatise on Human Nature (1739) David Hume divides the law of nations into two types. First are laws having to do with specifically international matters such as the sanctity of ambassadors, declaration of war, abstention from poisoned weapons and others that “are evidently calculated for the commerce, that is peculiar to different societies”. Alongside these, there are rules of general natural law which he groups in three: stability of possession, its transference by consent, and the performance of promises. Such rules are applicable between states in the same way as they are applicable between individuals because the social context is essentially similar. As Hume says, “The same interest produces the same effect in both cases.”1 ☼ Academy Professor, University of Helsinki, and Arthur Goodhart Visiting Professor of Legal Science, University of Cambridge. This is an extended version of a lecture given at the University of Edinburgh on 25 October 2007 to mark the tercentenary of the School of Law. 1 D Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature (ed E C Mossner, 1969) 3.2.11 (618).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.