The Opening of the Human Mind

Abstract

An anthropology of law is a useful method for diagnosing the mental health of a given society. The sad state of the idea of international law has made, and has been made by, the sickness of international society. Social forms are products of the human imagination. Throughout the whole of recorded human history, the self-socialising human mind has struggled to find ways to overcome the natural self-corrupting tendency of government and law, a pathological process in which the governors and the governed are liable to be co-conspirators. For better and worse, the European mind has played a leading part in the long story of the making of social forms, national and international, including the self-destructive mythology of the international system, dominated by the social forms of diplomacy and war. Since 1945, the European mind has abdicated its global intellectual responsibility, as it has constructed an inadequately imagined system of law and government in Europe, a state without a society – an ominous precedent. In the new social situation, national and international, of the twenty-first century, the human mind will imagine new ideas of law and government, new ideas of international society and international law.