Justice in a Society of States

Abstract

Cosmopolitan theorists cannot live with the contradiction between the logics of sovereignty, and of justice and rights, which is perhaps another way of saying that they have no real sense of political tragedy. The main aim of this chapter is to defend the continued relevance of the natural law or ‘society of states’ tradition of international relations thought, of which the conception of the state and international justice offered here is a development, and to show that its basic normative conception of international relations is sufficiently defensible in philosophical and practical terms for it to serve as a substantive theory of the state and international justice.