It was a tragic day in the history of humanity when the subtle and complex concept of law was crudely split into two – national law and the law between nations. In earlier times, there had been complex and subtle conceptions of the relationship among various forms of law and even of a common essence of all law. But the brutal managers of the new European polities, monarchies and republics of every degree of conservatism and reformism, chose to see their co-existence as intrinsically unsocial and hence governed by rules of more or less enlightened prudence and pragmatism. And the European worldview was made the worldview of all the world through the world-wide expansion of European power and influence.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, the contradiction between an intensely dynamic development of social relations across national frontiers and the archaic forms and rules of intergovernmental international unsociety became absurd and unbearable.

There could have been another concept of international law. There could be another concept of international law. There can be a conception of law which transcends the frontiers between national legal systems, which sees all legal systems as participating in an international legal system, and which allows international law, as so reconceived, to play the wonderfully creative functions of law in the self-constituting of all forms of society from the society of the family to the society of the whole human race, serving the common interest of all-humanity.