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The article aims to contribute from a history of science angle to the recent debate on the relation between legal scholarship, utopian ideals, and practice, which was spurred by the EJIL Symposium on Antonio Cassese's "Realizing Utopia" and subsequent publications in this journal. It defends a conception of legal scholarship that keeps a reflexive distance vis-à-vis practice and current political trends in international relations. It focuses on traditional background assumptions of international legal scholarship, which constantly threaten this reflexive distance. Arguably these background assumptions are a 19th century legacy and today - in a context of fragmentation and globalization - stand in the way of developing the full potential of international legal scholarship as a medium of societal reflection. The classic role of the scholar as a law reformer in the current context turns out to be more problematic than it may have been in the past. Inspired by Kelsenian concerns and Nietzschean metaphorics, the article instead suggests that international legal scholarship functions as a cooling medium for the overheated discursive operations of the political, economic and legal subsystems of World Society.
