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That positivism is not the promised land of legal methods has become a truism among critical international lawyers. All too often the proclaimed objectivity, neutrality and science has turned out to be intertwined with ideology and domination. In line with the historical-economic turn of the Helsinki school, Monica García-Salmones Rovira's book The Project of Positivism in International Law finds the historical roots of positivism deeply embedded in the development of a global neo-liberal economy. The economic foundations of the method are unearthed with two intellectual biographies of its founding fathers, Lassa Oppenheim and Hans Kelsen, whose life projects have so far escaped critical scrutiny. The book weaves into these two biographical studies the story of international law as a pragmatist and scientific project that freed the discipline from the tradition of natural law to become a servant of global economic interests.
Lassa Oppenheim is known as a representative of the British tradition and one of the most progressive international lawyers of the era before World War II. His biography illustrates how particularly the lawyers of the Empire answered to a specific demand: the need for law and adjudication in the light of a growing global economic interdependence. In terms of method, García-Salmones Rovira describes how Oppenheim could paradoxically argue for an international society and the principle of the balance of power, simply by stripping his legal method of philosophy and replacing it with the content-independent notion of progress (at 48). In the English tradition of liberal political thought, it was the power of interest per se that could create an international community, a community with its roots in commerce and free trade (at 67): "Interests claimed monopoly over normativity, interests being at the centre of the theory and the measure of the ethical value of the legal enterprise" (at 73).
