| Introduction | p. 1 |
| 'International law has become important' | p. 1 |
| Materialism and dialectics | p. 4 |
| The structure of the book | p. 5 |
| 'The Vanishing Point of Jurisprudence': International Law in Mainstream Theory | p. 9 |
| Beyond definition | p. 9 |
| Classic writers and debates | p. 16 |
| Disentangling denial | p. 16 |
| The will of the sovereign: Austin | p. 18 |
| The triumph of politics: Morgenthau | p. 19 |
| A third way? Carl Schmitt | p. 25 |
| Monism, dualism, positivism, naturalism | p. 32 |
| The high point of formalism: Kelsen | p. 34 |
| From rules to process: McDougal-Lasswell | p. 37 |
| Dissident Theories: Critical Legal Studies and Historical Materialism | p. 45 |
| Beyond pragmatism | p. 45 |
| Koskenniemi and the contradictions of liberalism | p. 48 |
| Marxism and international law | p. 60 |
| The inadequacies of Soviet theory | p. 60 |
| Radicalism with rules: B.S Chimni | p. 64 |
| For Pashukanis: An Exposition and Defence of the Commodity-Form Theory of Law | p. 75 |
| The rise and fall of Pashukanis | p. 75 |
| The General Theory of Law and Marxism | p. 77 |
| Marxist method and the failure of alternative theories | p. 79 |
| Law as ideology | p. 80 |
| Law as iniquitous content | p. 82 |
| From the commodity form to the legal form | p. 84 |
| A note on history and logic | p. 96 |
| The withering away of law | p. 97 |
| Critiques and reconstructions | p. 101 |
| The relevance for international legal scholarship | p. 113 |
| Coercion and the Legal Form: Politics, (International) Law and the State | p. 117 |
| The problem of politics | p. 117 |
| Pashukanis and state-derivation theory | p. 122 |
| (International) Law and the contingency of the state | p. 128 |
| (International) Law, politics and violence | p. 133 |
| Form, content, economics and politics in international law | p. 137 |
| The unlikely marriage of Pashukanis and McDougal | p. 141 |
| Problems | p. 143 |
| The violence of the legal form | p. 150 |
| States, Markets and the Sea: Issues in the History of International Law | p. 153 |
| The invisibility of history | p. 153 |
| Origins and prehistory: an eternity of international law? | p. 156 |
| Pre-colonial theory: the non-Western birth of international law? | p. 165 |
| Colonialism and international law: the birth of a new order | p. 169 |
| Amity lines: colonialism beyond law's boundaries | p. 179 |
| The development of sovereignty: from politics to abstraction | p. 184 |
| Absolute ownership and Roman law | p. 195 |
| From maritime law to international law | p. 197 |
| Early codes: the mercantile maritime roots of international law | p. 197 |
| Lineages of the mercantilist state | p. 201 |
| The Navigation Acts | p. 204 |
| The East India Companies | p. 206 |
| The freedom of the seas: a dissident interpretation | p. 208 |
| Excursus: mercantilism and the transition to capitalism | p. 214 |
| Categories and dialectics | p. 224 |
| Imperialism, Sovereignty and International Law | p. 225 |
| The nature of the relation | p. 225 |
| Specificity versus breadth | p. 226 |
| The crisis of mercantile colonialism | p. 230 |
| The imperialism of recognition | p. 235 |
| Ad-hoc legality in the nineteenth century | p. 240 |
| Positivism and its sources | p. 241 |
| 'Civilisation': a counterintuitive materialist analysis | p. 243 |
| Into Africa | p. 248 |
| The Berlin Conference and the 'scramble for Africa' | p. 250 |
| Mandates, colonies and sovereignty: tendencies and countertendencies | p. 256 |
| The empire of sovereignty | p. 260 |
| The international law of freedom? | p. 268 |
| New world order | p. 271 |
| Excursus: the Gulf War | p. 272 |
| The limits of legalistic opposition | p. 275 |
| The universality of legalism | p. 281 |
| Politics and the end of the rule | p. 282 |
| Force and law | p. 286 |
| Serving two masters: the imperialism of international law | p. 289 |
| Conclusion: Against the Rule of Law | p. 295 |
| Ideas, ideology and contestation | p. 295 |
| The rule of law's new advocates | p. 304 |
| From war to policing? | p. 308 |
| Against the rule of law | p. 314 |
| The future of the theory | p. 318 |
| Appendix: Pashukanis on International Law | p. 321 |
| Bibliography | p. 337 |
| Index | p. 365 |
| Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved. |
