Imagining World Order: Literature and International Law in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 by Chenxi Tang

Abstract

Reviewed by: Imagining World Order: Literature and International Law in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 by Chenxi Tang Andrea Gadberry Chenxi Tang, Imagining World Order: Literature and International Law in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2018). Pp. 360; 4 b&w half-tones. $59.95 cloth. In response to Hegel's proviso "that all the great events and characters of world history occur twice, so to speak," Marx located an error: Hegel "forgot to add: the first time as high tragedy, the second time as low farce."1 Chenxi Tang's Inventing World Order: Literature and International Law in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 requires the addition of still further genres to Marx's maxim, at least when it comes to characterizing the world-historical emergence of the early modern European international legal order. In Tang's erudite book, the matter of "world order"—"as much a literary as a legal or political problem" (1)—requires that tragedy and farce make room for epic poetry, political romance, the chronicle, the mirror for princes, the tragicomedy, the sentimental novel, the Bildungsroman, and many other genres along the way.2 Inventing World Order is a generous guide through European legal and literary history. It is also an athletic performance: the book spans three centuries and, by my count, at least eight national traditions (Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, French, German, English, and Swedish—King Gustavus Adolphus makes an early appearance on behalf of Scandinavia (13)—not to mention the lingua franca of Latin!) and analyzes examples too abundant to recount in full here as it portrays both nascent international legal theory and emergent, revived, and reinvented literary genres. The book's range makes it a welcome resource for many potential readers, especially for specialists of one of the book's time periods or linguistic traditions in search of a wider historical and comparative view. In brief, across the book's introduction, six chapters, and epilogue, Tang examines how literary and legal works negotiate relationships between and among sovereigns and states. In this account, the function of literature is at once "to cope with the uncertainty, instability, and incompleteness of international law" (9) and to "leave more visible traces" (11) on an international order than it perhaps can on any individual modern state in which "rationality … mask[s] the poetic operations constitutive of it" (11). In the rules of genre, meanwhile, Tang locates a "normative character" within literary order's constitution into genres, an order which, in turn, shapes and responds to the burgeoning international order around it. The literary sphere forges legal fictions and responds to international strife, all the while indexing the tectonic shifts of early modern statecraft in a period marked by political and epistemic convulsion. The legal axis of the book, so to speak, tells the story of founding fictions and concepts designed to understand and shape "a state-centered world legal order contingent upon the voluntary actions of individual states" (57). Tang moves nimbly through legal history and a history of ideas in and through statecraft, tracing how the subjects of the international order respond to and diagnose the political and legal challenges of the early modern era. Reading Vitoria, Suárez, and Grotius, among many other legal and political philosophers, Tang narrates the emergence of reason of state and, along with it, the advent of "self-preservation, self-interest, and expediency" in the legal and political imagination (61). Along the way, Imagining World Order considers the birth of foundational narratives, concepts, and categories of many kinds. Tang leads the reader from the formation [End Page 739] of legal personality to that of private property, from the appearance of the private individual to the ideal of the cosmopolite. The reader encounters Machiavelli's tips for diplomats (always dissemble!) (50) and meets the new-fangled creature known as the "businessman" who cuts quite an international (and literary) figure as he moves in spaces "outside of a state or between states" (243). The book, then, accounts for "the classical period of international law" (1), but in showing how these famous (sometimes infamous) legal concepts take form and exert force, Tang tells a literary history simultaneously—one that...