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Hello everyone and welcome back to new books in Intellectual History, a podcast channel on the new books network. I'm Alexandra Autoliobert, a host of the channel, and today I have a great pleasure of talking to Mark Somos and Anna Peters, who are the editors of the New Volume, The State of Nature Histories of an Idea, published by Brill in 2021. Anna and Mark, welcome to the podcast. Thank you.
Well, thank you both so much for being here. It's such an exciting volume to talk about and one that feels very timely, in fact. But before we dive into talking about some of those more timely aspects, I was wondering if you could both introduce yourself to listeners and maybe tell us a little bit about how you both came to collaborate on the book and that's just come out. Thank you very much.
My name is Mark Somos and I work at the Mark Spunk Institute for Comparative for Intellectual Law. As an undergraduate, I study medieval history and I loved it. But it feels an interesting history of what you thought, which of a student in a master's degree before I talk about the book Science Proper. For my first PhD, the most fascinating parts of that turned out to be constitutional law and international relations.
I also continued writing about legal history, the multi-second PhD law. I found that history, political science and law are more specialized than this thing, not only used to be. So figures I studied, such as Shrommodhan or Hugo Grisha, so Joe Locke, even Jonathan and James Medicine, thought of them and used them as aspects of an integral whole with no discipline boundaries. And that, or each of your integrity, feels natural and fertile to me to this day.
And started teaching in UK and US law, political science and history departments will be a decade. We see my students respond to that original flexibility for these disciplines. I was very grateful to join on that for the Mark Spunk Institute for Public International Law in Heideberg, but it's come in issues encouraged and supported. You wouldn't be able to write this book on the state of nature, I think, at any of the other places where I've worked.
Without having to involve multiple departments and spending time developing the shared language and methodology first. Regarding the book itself, the theme was a burning and obvious choice. Most people know about the state of nature, whether from Hobbes or Locke or Rousseau or Wales, or assimilated by no thinker. And I've read a little bit about it in school, but until in 2002, the only segregationist fellow PhD student at Harvard and I had these simultaneous three commitments.
And he realized that the state of nature is not like most other legal devices or fictions. It has tremendous creative power. It is not used like most legal fictions, for instance, the early modern invention of the corporate form between our core and joint company. In the hand of Hobbes, I was so the state of nature creates words for his rights and obligations, supports first principles of individual dignity and political legitimacy.
That I'll turn a blind consistently and with far reaching consequences to hold range of constitutional and international arrangements. The only sign to write an excellent book by the state of nature in Hobbes and I wrote one on the state of nature's role in the micro revolution. Because in the last I was working with under the Mark Spunk Institute where I learned about historical background and current applications of innovative legal constructs, such as the crime of aggression or global constituency, that finally found the proper context for the state of nature. So this is the first place in the first colleague that allowed me to recombine history, political food and law as they used to function in conjunction until quite recently.
Some current legal scholars are trying to develop legal fictions and innovative right interpretations existing legal categories to answer urgent problems from discrimination to environmental harm. And although the state of nature is familiar to us now, when both and both of us were gracious, it was a concept, it was new and fresh and capable of innovation. It was striking us in the effect of us, for instance, the current heritage of mankind, for the pre-quitioning principle of people becoming now. So I feel that in many ways the past couple of decades have really been leading up to this point.
Thank you, Mark. I think you give too much credit to the Mark's Plunk and to others because you are really the expert on the state of nature and you are also the lead editor of this volume. I'm only an ordinary legal scholar, so I studied law in Germany and Switzerland in the United States, but I always had an interest in international law. So I wanted to do international law from the beginning on what I finally ended up doing, and I've been a professor of international law and constitutional law in Switzerland for 12 years before moving to the Mark's Plunk to Heidelberg, where I've been since 2013.
But I have no other training in history or political theory, but I now currently am editing the Journal of the History of International Law, and I also co-edited an Oxford Handbook on the History of International Law together with a chronic battle fasbender. So that's all I can say about history. And I got to know Mark Stomas when he proposed to apply for a very competitive Humboldt scholarship to come to the Mark's Plunk and I gladly invited him. And so he joined the Mark's Plunk Institute as a Humboldt fellow and then he won an even more prestigious Heisenberg fellowship.
And that's how he came to propose this joint project and I think that Mark and his team is a really true disciplinary extension and asset to the Mark's Plunk Institute, which is formally according to its denomination and library, working or dealing with public international law, European Union law and comparative law. And now Mark, he really breathed into the Institute of Spirit of all the disciplines he masters. And as I said, the state of nature is really his topic. And we're certainly going to come to talk a little bit about that, crossing over of different disciplines and the particular research culture, I suppose, that's given birth to this volume.
But before we do that, I was wondering if we could maybe start at the beginning, which is, you know, we're talking about this concept of the state of nature and Mark, you've already gone into this a little bit. Thank you in your introduction. But you know, this is a concept that's been used over the centuries and such a variety of different ways to think about themes like rights, about property, the state, about the laws, among many other different. And you've mentioned already that most people probably think about people like Holmes, maybe even Rousseau when they're thinking about this term.
But I wonder if you could perhaps give listeners who might not be so familiar with the topic and the concept of the state of nature, about broad brushstrokes over view of what is this kind of state of nature and why and how has it been used by writers to date? The concept is a concept rather in terms of art in law, theology, political science and literature. It has been used in many senses, some of them are connected and some are quite distinct. So it has been used to describe innocence, the uncultivated and untamed condition of lands or animals.
The kingdom of Satan, the opposite of the state of grace, nudity, mostly in the 18th century, and the illegal fiction for the pre-political condition of humanity, where people gain and hold rights. Some of them have to give up and delegate for the combined and political state. And this last sense has been a continuous use since Don Sakhrenas and the middle of healthcare. The 30th and 14th centuries, all the way through early modern thinkers who we have mentioned, such as Hugo Gracious, Thomas Hall of Chondock, Samuel Pofendorf, to a lack of theorist, to a momentous curiosity, who saw human but tall, to more recent figures, through Scarshmit, Robert Music, John Woods, or Long Fuller, who faced the new political or legal problem, such as ending of Civil War, replacing a monarchy with an act of democracy, or formulating an international law doctrine of our neutrality.
Thinkers would posit their own version of the state of nature, derive fundamental principles from it and apply it to the political problem. For instance, by arguing that individuals cannot survive alone, therefore, Civil War must end, and the new party must be formed. Or that individual freedoms are so fundamental that monarchs, powers, are always excessive. Or the states will always be in a state of nature with each other.
Therefore, the decision to remain neutral and continue to create the parties that are at work with each other will always be a social decision. Yeah, all the authors, Mark mentioned are of course authors who also wrote either directly on international law or natural law and international law, or are highly relevant also for international legal scholarship and practice today. And it is still absolutely common sense to claim that international relations, whose main actors are still the states, that the states among themselves are in a state of nature or are alike in a state of nature. So most international lawyers who we would call to be legal positivists and international relations scholars of the realist brand, they all explicitly or implicitly espouse this view, that the states are in a kind of state of nature.
Or as Mark would maybe say, they employ this fiction. You're probably familiar with the famous book by Headley Bull, founder of the so-called English School of International Relations, with a title, A Narchical Society, So, Society Without Leadership, Without Rules, you could say. And the forefather of this thinking is normally considered to be Thomas Hobbes, whom you also mentioned. And in our book, we have a chapter by Benjamin Strowman, who gives a new old view on what Hobbes might have meant and how he received antique writing.
I can give you one more example from international law. There is the principle called effectiveness. For example, effectiveness prescribes that a government which controls the territory of a state, the effective government, will be the one which is allowed to represent the state. However, evil it might be.
For example, the Assad regime is the government of Syria and represents the states of Syria. So, in a way, this principle of effectiveness leads to the situation that might make right. And that out of the factual situation, which is brutish and nasty, that legal principles can flow from that. And the reason is, at least that said to be the reason that in international law, there is no monopoly of the legitimate use of force with a centralized entity.
So, that's the key difference to the state. And there is also no compulsory jurisdiction available, that there would be one court to which everybody has access to resource disputes peacefully. There are increasingly international courts and tribunals, for example, the international court of justice sitting in the Hague, but the jurisdiction of this court is quite limited. So, only if special treaty clauses grant jurisdiction to the court, then it can rule and that's pretty seldom the case.
And that means that the other ways of resolving disputes, namely by resort to armed force, is still a viable option in international relations and the self-help, which are called countermeasures or even reprisals, they are still possible. So, that's my kind of access point to the idea or concept of the state of nature. And the other entry point for me is, I'm also dealing with animal law. So, I'm trying to actually invent a field global animal law with a basic argument that nowadays our dealings with animals, they are also globalized.
So, we are in a globalized condition and that therefore we need some regulation of the problems, not only on the domestic level, but also on the international level. In any case, with regard to animals, of course, as you know, the nature of man has always been described by philosophers and scientists and other intellectuals in contract distinction to animals. So, there has been over the centuries that debate, what makes man, man is man unique, what distinguishes man from animals. And astonishingly these debates, they are constantly waging on and they play a big role for the moral and also legal statues that we ascribe to animals.
That's a little bit of a different debate maybe, but that what draws me or what also brought me to work with Mark on that book. And I think that really encapsulates so much of, as you say, these different and variety kind of access points as you call them in the volume, right? So, we've kind of talked a little bit about the more historical points, the kind of the legal, the kind of the global points, which are all captured in various kind of creative ways in the volume. So, I was wondering if you might tell listeners then a little bit about the types of scholars who've actually contributed to the volume and their different fields and approaches.
And maybe how that perhaps also shapes who you see as the audience for the book. We're on the intellectual history channel here, but there's a lot of different disciplines who I can see having a great interest in the volume. Thank you, you're absolutely right. We are going to be able to bring together 17 authors from four continents.
And they range from fresh PhDs, through professors, to retired and ready in departments of history and political science, anthropology, philosophy, literature and law, as well as a couple of faculty in lawyers. And we have known some of them for four years from previous projects. And a few of me have met before me might be specifically based on their ongoing research projects. I hope you don't mind if I give a shout out to them because you're very grateful to Daniel Alaman, who, Paul Adwins, and Janis Abrigalis, and Mary Fuller, and David Gruell, and Francesco Iwo LaRou, and Edward Coley, and last of Coley, and Emile Simpson and Tom Sparks, and Madge Myshthamann, and Colby Daquist and Grandma Coley, serving in the Siblegubu hand for the engagement, and just fantastic papers.
Just a few examples of this for the unusual project. In addition to the Northern Lands of External Blind Periods, you also use the internal review system that I each author, usually from different disciplines, commented on another chapter, extensively in writing. Before you met in person in Berlin in summer of 2019 for a multi-day workshop. We couldn't cover all the costs to that meeting, so we must participate at the own budgets, just to be able to participate.
And the additional lands of reviews and costs that they really paid, attached to the dedication and excitement that they brought to this project. And even in the Sanse Cornet, the truth is that we are very grateful to them. Concerning leadership, I think the 14 chapters will be definitely less separately, but also an interesting state of nature and Renaissance discovery, or invittoria, or hobs or log creations or pufrandor, or the state of nature used once again with its original creative potential to address urgent current problems of environmental harm or social inequality, or as I mentioned, the interactions and any law. But the book will be successful, I think, if it's read in its entirety, cover to cover.
And readers discover the connections between one dimension, historical and current, and on the other dimension between legal and economic applications, or the state of nature fiction. So the book as a whole aims very simply to open up our problems solving imagination again. Yeah, Marc mentioned all the authors, and I just would like to highlight in a biased way, two young authors who are currently two postdocs at the Max Plan Institute, the first is Francesca O'Laro. She's an Italian national, she did her PhD in Florence.
And she wrote in the book a chapter on peculiar referring to what shepherds possess as a flock, and peculiar is exactly what is not the minimum. So, peculiar is something for all those who cannot have dominion, so slaves, women, children and shepherds. And her argument is that this provides a legal framework to think of the otherness in the state of nature. I think this is a wonderful argument.
And the second chapter I would like to highlight is by Tom Sparks. He's a postdoc currently at the Max Planck. He's a Scottish, he holds a PhD in law also from Durham. And he in this book writes a chapter on the place of the environment in state of nature discourses.
And I mentioned these two young scholars because they are, I think, exemplary in they are lawyers, but they work on the fringes of the discipline, and they build the bridges to other disciplines history for Francesca and sociology social theory for Tom. And I recommend these chapters in particular. Oh, well certainly have to have Francesca and Tom here to talk about their research in the future if they haven't been on already. While we're on this topic of the different chapters, I was wondering if you might then either of you or maybe both of you give us just a general outline of how the book is structured and the progression that takes us through the volume.
So the book is brought in chapters post-intellectual. And authors and editors have the wonderful time discussing alternative ways of structuring it. By overriding themes, we have come up with multiple possibilities such as humanity and nature, political relations, or domestic and international relations. And I think it's a richness of every single chapter that no reductionist structure could be imposed.
Each chapter is rather than to one most of its theme, but the state of nature was used to explore. So we just ended up arranging the chapters chronologically and cross referring to each other. With no subdivision or structure that we are confident that the book is cured more than it would have explained. But the chapter titles and each chapter's clear and succinct abstract will readily guide the reader who picks up the book.
But just to illustrate the range, let me say that the first chapter sheds new light on the Manchinese cast relationship between Hobbes, Fusse, and the Major and Dialog. As Anh has mentioned, the second show that the Habesite of Nature featured in early modern exploration narratives and mental categories of discovery. The third year was 2000 years of literature on things shepherds was asked, outside you have a legal order to show how this sub-altern legal domain came to hold the state of nature in genealogies of the state. The fourth one covers the use of the state of nature and the ideology of Spanish imperialism.
The fifth shows how Locke anchored fundamental rights in the state of nature despite appreciating the risk of turning the state of nature into a rhetorical tool for unjust and continuous rebellions. The next two chapters are profound explorations of how the family functions in the state of nature and generates rules that have the family to contribute to and control both the quality and the economy, the ninth chapter surveys, early modern and Enlightenment revolutionary and interstate state of nature discourses. The tenth turns an extensive role in the state of nature concept played in the 18th century and by slavery and social contract theories. The last chapter is the state of nature in the joint discourse of scientific and civil progress, leading century Britain.
The 12th looks at Central European deployments of the state of nature to understanding ethnic versus national identity and material and cultural stages of progress. The 13th was a compelling line from early modern state of nature right as a count of humanities and environmental responsibilities to the tasks and promises of 21st century into a shillow in the same realm. This is a chapter by Tom that one has mentioned. The final chapter is the high order review of state of nature theorizing both in terms of the historical economic and legal ways in which such theorizing has been done and regard to rhetorical reasons why it has been done.
As Mark said, we have no internal subsparts, but just the chapter in roughly chronological order. And in fact, in the workshop and afterwards in writing we really discussed back and forth which kind of structures one could use. There were variations which I found attractive, but each had a drawback. So this is in a way the quiet modest result.
And of course we were aware of the quest by publishing houses and also I think proper request to give edited volumes for the first time. So we were aware of the cultural outcomes form and shape and structure and streamline the chapters and so on. However, in this case because of the varieties of users and the variety of discourses it turned out to be it would have been a straight jacket and so we refrained from it. That can be seen as a shortcoming, but that's how it is.
But it's highly readable. I will say that to begin with that. I think Mark is right now with the abstracts and everything. Yeah, it should be read I think from cover to cover.
I think that while you identify that so many people will pick and choose depending on their perhaps the time that they work on their geographical disciplinary backgrounds. And there is so much to glean from reading it in kind of that more comparative way. But let's focus a little bit on your own introduction to the volume and what I want to pick up on is this concept that you've already and it's already briefly picked up on. And this is effective fiction and its relation to the state of nature.
And this is perhaps something that people are less familiar with. I think even for those who are familiar perhaps with the state of nature might not understand it or have kind of thought about it in terms of this effective fiction. So I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what you mean by this and what and how this understanding of effective fiction really drove you to actually producing the volume. Excellent question.
Thank you. As mentioned, the creative part of the state of nature concept is stunning. It's just breathtaking. I was wondering what you're getting most people out of there with our hopes and also use the state of nature to extend to state order and democratic legitimacy.
But these thinkers account in turn and immense real life impact whether the readers and advocates actually understood their writings. In their hands, the idea became a powerful agent to its own right, shaped in the French Revolution and 20th century dictatorships. But the point is this not every fiction has this sort of effect. An example that we start in introduction is the great survivor.
An organism, geneticists have invented recently, had them hypothesize a switch between the DNA functional reproduction and conditions of resource abundance and between the function of repairing DNA in adverse conditions. Now, geneticists do not know whether the great survivor, able to switch between reproduction repair, ever existed. But positing it enabled them to pursue lines of research that led to actual drugs that are now in use. What happened here?
Frankenstein or for younger listeners, Shrek are fictional organisms that had not as far as I know affected the way. There's a remarkable real life power to this many co-fiction. Our constructing fiction is integral not only to the literary professions but also in mathematics, economics and law and even in medicine from time to time. Some of these fiction have obvious real life impact.
Hobbes quote was for instance was granted by Stochlacimon O'Korta, but also he reinvented in the early 17th century was the right that everybody has. The American Revolution was justified in the creative state of nature arguments. Some fiction have adverse effects, for instance, when the global crisis in economists now argue that positing an ever-rational, economic person, or the misstake, the real consequences. And economics must take emotions and biases into accountants' givens, and other fiction have no discernible effect.
Now the state of nature is a fact of legal fiction, which does not mean that this meaning is fixed. There are record informations. For instance, the state of nature is a place where pre-political rights live or go to hide. And individuals must give up state of nature as to create the polity, but if the polity fails them, they have the inalienable right to return to the state of nature to treat these fundamental rights.
Another record of information is the state of nature as to the nation between states. Since a universal state is impracticable, the rights and obligations that states have toward each other are analogous to those that individuals had before they joined the polity. The point is that the state of nature is a legal fiction that has tremendous real-life effects through the centuries, and the variation in height was used. Combined with its real-life effects is just fascinating.
Creating things out of nothing with thoughts and words is magical already, but many of the things we make out of scenario are just frankly boring. The state of nature is not one of the boring ones. We can look at the interjectors in this way, you will confront this. Marc, you are really into it, I think.
I've noticed that you've been again oscillating between fiction and legal fiction, and that was a point of debate among us when writing the introduction, which was a back-and-forth process, and actually the introduction became shorter and shorter. So it's now pretty short. I wanted to say that legal fiction is also something which is a technical legal instrument, one could say. For example, the legal fiction that a child born during marriage will be deemed to be the child of the husband.
So that is a famous legal fiction, which also has a real-life effect, of course. In international law, there is one famous legal fiction that's the so-called Vatellian fiction because it was Vatell in his book on the law of Daudet gi-en, who came up with it, namely if in a state, an alien, so a foreigner is injured, for example, his property is taken away, so nowadays that happens to foreign investors, then it's presumed to be an injury of the state because when Vatell construed that and wrote that in that way, this was necessary to bring this harm in the purview of international law, which was at that time. Or in Vatell's conception, only interstate law. So the individual investor didn't have any place in international law, and that's why the harm done to him had to be fictionalized as being done harm to the state in its own national, and then the state was allowed to pick this up and to complain towards the whole state for its injury in the person of that investor.
And this fiction, actually, this legal fiction, it still lingers, it plays an enormous role in international law and creates a lot of confusion, although it's no longer necessary because we now have international human rights. And the individuals with his or her own rights are existing and are persons in international law, but still that fiction's festers around. So just an example for a legal fiction, a powerful effect of legal fiction nowadays. That's how you know you've got a good book when you come away still disagreeing about the nature of the political thing.
But maybe then we can think about some of the aims, if we don't agree on perhaps some of the conclusions, but you bring up two things in your introduction. And the first is that you say the book intends to address what you call the fragmented historiography of the state of nature as effectively go fiction. And secondly, to counter what you say is the loss of creative problem solving potential in current uses due to a neglect of past ingenuity. And this second in particular, historiography is fascinating for the historians, and I'm not sure who else, but this second element of creative problem solving, I think, is really what catapults the volume into into really exciting territory.
So I was wondering if you might tell us a little bit about why these two aims of the book are so important and what they really contribute to our understanding and to scholarship more generally. So concerning the first aim, there is extensive literature in the state of nature in Hobbes or local or soul, and the reason about a number of the thinkers whom they discuss. There is less of the state of nature and environmental justice, for instance. So some of our chapters open up new avenues already, even if you consider them as freestanding chapters.
But strange to say, even the existing literature that is sad brings historical uses of the state of nature together. So if you can see what Pufandor made up gently as usage, but how the interstate meaning in Hobbes had to be transformed by Bataal, to be able to propose a fundamentally peaceful international order. So in this sense, putting chapter side by side and making sure that they relate to each other addresses a gap in scholarship. And the other ambition, exactly as you said, is to just show the historical ingenuity of state of nature discourses.
And often not the state of nature, but the method of recovering legal history itself, as an improved tool to the legal scholars concerned about today and tomorrow. The last chapters were environmental and social inequality. And on those discussions of international institutions and animal rights, exemplified the second sort of education that you're hoping for alongside the better integrated historical understanding. Yeah, Mark, the creativity of the writers who are studied in the book.
That's of course something which is always within the bounds of their discipline. Although of course the disciplinary bounds were different in different times from today. But I think that this question of how much can you invent and how creative can you be in order to solve problems of the world or to put it bluntly, that's not identical in the various disciplines we have in the book. So for example, for legal scholars, nowadays, the limits to their creativity is clearly the legal rules as they are generally accepted to be, although there will always be diversity of opinion about how a certain rule is to be understood, especially in international law.
There is also unwritten law, customary law, and so you don't have a book to look into. And so there can be a range, a broad range of understanding whether there is a rule at all and what it means and how it must be applied to the facts. But nevertheless, legal scholarship and legal practice is based on the presumption that there are certain limits to what you can say or invent. I mean, you can say or invent it, but nobody cares because it will not be accepted as forming a legal argument.
So the creativity of somebody who is in the discipline of law is limited. And Marx claimed that nowadays everybody has less imaginative and inventive than maybe in past centuries also has to do, of course, with the denser regulation of the world. So there are simply more laws, however controversial and vague they may be, which pose or which kind of, yeah, are the signposts for the creative scholar. So it's a kind of limited bounded creativity, which is possible in legal scholarship.
I would be always in favour of trying to exploit it as much as possible, but there are these limits. You said it not us. The lawyer is talking about the lack of creativity, not the historians. One of our, one of many disciplinary kind of differences, I suppose.
But what I wanted them to kind of pick up on is, you know, you have this huge chronological, geographical disciplinary range and really working on this idea of creativity in the book. But there are some really clear themes and points of convergence that come out when you read the book covered together, when you have it in that kind of comparative reading. And I was wondering if maybe the two of you might like to maybe just pick out a couple of these, maybe someones, I don't know, some of these points of convergence that you perhaps found unexpected, but you weren't really anticipating to come out of the volume, perhaps. Thank you.
I think we mentioned a few, already, but creating units such as the family and state or an international order has benefited, proposing and describing hypothetical others, those who are outside the family, outside the state, who are in fading and world to end, international disorder. So, during the preparation for the volume, we knew that bringing the chronological and geographic range that you mentioned to bear on these issues would be interesting. In terms of the unexpected, to be honest, I did not force the collections between historical currents and potential future uses on the state of nature to be so vibrant and so compelling. I thought we had to trace state of nature, this course is on dignity and then by slavery, war and peace and family and the state, for human activity and the environment, meticulously through these intertwined historical trajectories, to be able to bring out in full the potential to be able to bring out the concept was for current problems, to this environment to have a social inequality.
But when the authors engaged and we engaged each other, commenting on drops and advising and linking chapters to each other, I was surprised I'd like to see these connections come up with force and lucidity. Yeah, Mark, you all right. I have a little to add. I think that the themes you mentioned, namely the theme of exploitation, exploitation of humans and exploitation of nature as a resource came up basically in each chapter.
So, yeah, so go ahead and read the book in short. I think that's the easiest way to pick out more of those. But maybe then we can move to then is thinking about some of these contemporary concerns that both of you have raised, because it does. In many cases, links or provides a very obvious signposting to these connections between historic notions of the state of nature and current political, social, legal concerns.
I wonder if you might just give us a couple of examples from some of the chapters that you thought that might be helpful for listeners to conceptualize how this is taking shape in the volume. So we are trying to bring history to life and an anacronism is a real danger. It's important to, it's obvious but important to note that the historic notions that we are dealing with are of course reconstructions of how post-takers that with their current political social and legal problems. So, Hocklouit, this cousin-mon chapter, had geographic expansion and discovery, hopes that the civil war, both and all had shattering political fragmentation, work had a global resolution, work and one would do had British responsibility for empire-wide progress and decay.
Grand-Ville-sharp had slavery, in short of each had nation-building. It's very specific major challenges that they analyzed and worked on by the state of nature-pism, and all of them had religion, the economy and the family. It's ever-present and it's considered while developing on their particular tasks. So the civil war and the glorious revolution are over, and so is a key had nation-building, sort of, but empire and slavery are still with us.
And so one of the Swedish contributions in these volume-s, political issues, is what Hocklouit understand these continuities. And one example, that I discuss in my state of nature book, is the U.S. courts. Society-story-costatial documents extensively to decide, kiss, song, gay marriage or parental rights, reasonable search and seizure, and other disputes, and they perform historical analysis of these sources, almost always, very badly.
They don't understand the history of underpins, they're reasoning. But the higher the way in which historic notions are helpful in addressing contemporary issues is the very boldness, originality and precision in using and reformulating the state of nature concept. To map out the United States legal, but super political rights, relations and duties that I believe are collectively through the surface. So when Puffando says we have state of nature obligations to other humans who are weak, and we have these obligations, and rights to other humans have, when we are weak, irrespective of the rules of the state we live in, can such rights and obligations be easily transferred to animals based on the same or similar moral and legal foundations, as those that Puffando and those who we have influenced have developed.
My luck argues that we have state of nature rights to environmental resources, as long as we do not waste them or deprive others of basic necessities, can both be created use of this effective legal fiction, and the immense influence he has had on subsequent legal thinkers and legal interpretation, be transferred creatively and effectively to the future environmental law. So to answer these questions, I think you have to read our book and to write a few more. Yeah, Mark, you pointed to the dangers of anachronism, and there is currently an international legal historiography or scholarship, indeed a kind of debate about how and whether you can put the study of the history of international law to current users, and at what point you run the danger of reading history backwards and presentism and looking for predecessors of current legal institutions, although this does not do justice to how the legal institutions were understood in their own time. So there is this label of foreign office history, because that's exactly what the foreign offices of the world do, for example, when there is a dispute about a boundary or so that they look for evidence, for historical evidence only with a view to making their case.
So that's not serious historical scholarship. On the other hand, I agree with Mark, who's always in favor of a usable history, that, well, this idea of understanding the past completely in its own terms and in the context is of course, it's an idea. It's an ideal, it's a regulatory idea which I think should guide our investigations, but of course it is not possible because we inevitably have our standpoint, which isn't the present. So we read the sources and interpret them with our own fore-fashionedness to use the term.
So yeah, just asking this question and just debating it, what the past reflection on state of nature tells us now already brings us into this meta debate how this can be useful at all, or whether it is admissible at all, or whether we can draw in quotation marks any lessons at all. But of course, that's always something which every scholar in legal history has to pose himself and herself again and again. So our book is just one manifestation of this perennial problem, I would say. But it comes at a very important salient time for that.
I mean, many of these questions are coalescing today with the current COVID-19 pandemic and you do actually, you know, not to that in your introduction. You know, we've had so much in the media about, you know, are we in the state of nature? Do we need a new social contract? All of these historical kind of concepts are being revised and kind of rethought for the current day.
So I'm wondering if you might kind of picking up on what you've been saying already speculate on how the book and some of the themes and the questions that it's raising actually might contribute to thinking about the current crisis and how we perhaps go forward in this. I mean, there is a huge amount of legislation and scholarship that's coming out of the pandemic. So I wonder if you if you might position yourself ambitiously in that discussion. Excellent question.
Thank you. The flows in interstate cooperation on vaccine development and distribution. Actually, it reminds us of Hobbes' state of nature that was the most obvious parallel to rule. But the reasons try to gain some ground in this sort of what Italian state of nature in which states recognize their interdependence and pretend to cooperate at least minimally for moral reasons.
But reality is obvious endorsement of our thesis concerning the importance of the state of nature device or fiction. The pandemic brought home, not immoral but in called indisputable terms that we are one species and we stand all four together. The share of physical nature not only our bodies but also in the world we inhabit an impact. We're carrying or not caring for each other is caring or not caring for ourselves.
I would like to add that during the pandemic, the principle one health has been brought to the fore and this principle goes in the direction of what Mark says, but even beyond the human species, by pointing to the fact that the pandemic which is now on us is a zoonosis which came from animals, maybe from the bad laboratory, maybe over the wild market, and that it is indispensable to tackle human health, animal health and the health of the planet in a comprehensive multi-dimensional way because the health of everyone is connected. So, and this is I think really something which is now on top of the debate due to COVID that it is new pandemics will come and they will come in an increasingly quicker pace exactly because humans interact with animals, with wild animals, on a much more intensively. There are millions or merriads of bacteria waiting to jump on us in the rainforest for example. So, it's only a matter of time until these things happen again and that's just another variation of the theme of exploitation which I've read through all the chapters.
Certainly. We've come to the end of our hour to talk about the book but what I'd really love to press you both on as eminent scholars in your field is to hear a little bit about where this research is taking you. Is this a theme that's continuing to develop within your own research over the next couple of years? Or are you taking a tangent and moving away from the state of nature or the biological state of nature?
Thank you. The idea of this obsession with nature has been written for about 20 years now and as mentioned, I'm extremely fortunate to have come to the Institute where this cause this area of interdisciplinary work is encouraged. And while I don't plan to pursue this theme in particular in the future, I think that our collaboration has informed the way in which I'm going to look at 20% of legal fictions as they unfold and as they are discussed at the Institute. So, that's just no better and violent in the world where I can continue this change of thought.
Currently, my team and I are writing a new history of putting into a show law by finding a copy of the first editions of Grisha's Rights of War and Peace. So, this universal consensus that this book, first published in 1625, more at the beginning of modern international law. You read this in a text book, you read this in just about a legal history book. I'm not sure it's true, but it's a reading and important maxim.
What is true is that most publications and internationals since 1625 have been common to its own gracious. There are hundreds and hundreds of them. Grisha's also became the core of international teaching for centuries. And his books are invoked all the time in legal arguments and co-decisions, both domestic and international to his day.
What has done was to go through the annotations, the thousands of scholars, lawyers and politicians have made their copies over the past 400 years. We have been looking at the value copies of 1625, the first edition in 1650, the first edition of the Treaty of Australia. To figure out Grisha's real reception, including the way he shaped the entire field. And this is going to be a so-called global census.
Only three such censuses have been admitted to date because they are labor-intensive and difficult, but they are highly rewarding. There's one Copernicus from Shakespeare and one on the anatomist, Andrassizaleus. When we finish our on some Grisha's in 2035, the 400th anniversary of the book's first appearance, I think we'll rewrite the history of the same way. But the other three censuses changed how we think about and understand the astronomy, drama and medicine.
Like Mark, I'm also not directly going to continue on the state of nature, but I have two favorite themes which are connected, namely animals and also war. And both are related to the debates on the state of nature. I just am finishing to co-edit a book on animals in war. So it's a legal book that's about international humanitarian law, the law of armed conflict, and the animals as neglected victims of war.
So the various chapters investigate whether animals, to what extent they are civilian or military objects, whether they could even be likened to combatants and be targeted, how they should be protected as part of the natural environment and so on. And I'm also co-editing a handbook on global animal law. As I said at the beginning, my basic idea is that we need a global regulatory approach to tackle the various problems, animals, domestic, wild and liminal animals face. And so together with a colleague from Harvard and a postdoc from the Max Plunk, we are editing this handbook.
And I'm also constantly working on themes of the law, use ad bellum and use in bellow together with another postdoc. We edit a book series called Max Plunk Triologues on the law of peace and war. And actually in that series, we also try as a scholarly approach to invite scholars from different backgrounds in terms of worldview, regional background and methodological approach to engage in a conversation in a triologue on one single legal problem in order to tease out exactly the dependency of the legal arguments they make on their pre-understandings and to thereby to highlight the pluralism of international legal scholarship, which is necessary for to overcome its Eurocentrism. So that's my current work.
Sounds like a very productive next few years in Heidelberg. I look forward to seeing that comes out of it. Mark and Anna, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. A reminder to listen is the book is The State of Nature, Histories of an Idea Published by Brill this year in 2021.
Anna and Mark, thank you again for being on the podcast. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you Alexandra for the lovely conversation.