The first Letter on a Regicide Peace

Commonwealth and Covenant: The West in a Neo-Medieval Era of International Affairs

“…The secret, unseen, but irrefragable bond of habitual intercourse holds them together even when their perverse and litigious nature sets them to equivocate, scufle, and ight, about the terms of their written obligations. 37 In other words, Burke inverts the modern primacy of rights and contracts by arguing that the mutual moral obligations of interpersonal relations are more primary than abstract, formal, and procedural standards linked to activities for either state-administrative or market-commercial purposes. Crucially, this extends to ties across nations and sovereign states, which suggests that the family of nations and peoples embeds the society of states and markets.…”

Carl Schmitt's Vattel and the 'Law of Nations' between Enlightenment and Revolution

“…Instead he developed an account of shared manners and the common inheritance of Roman law in order to describe Europe as a single community -'virtually one great state having the same basis of general law' -within which the enforcement of the law of nations was analogous to the enforcement of domestic law within a polity. 70 Like Chambrier's 1795 Essai sur le droit des gens , Burke's 1795 Letters on a regicide peace advanced an argument against ending the war against France -an argument that rested on a much stronger account of international society than Vattel's. Where Chambrier constructed this position through an explicit critique of Vattel's revision of Wolff , Burke developed it by abandoning Vattel altogether.…”

Sites for Sore Eyes

“…It is an erect countenance, it is a firm adherence to principle, it is a power of resisting false shame and frivolous fear, that assert our good faith and honor, and assure to us the confidence of mankind. 10 A sidebar: At every stage of the Internet's growth, it seems, the servile vice called fraud makesits unwelcomeappearance. AMarch 1999study by the General Accounting Office (GAO), an agency within the Congress, found that securitiestrading on the Internet,popular amonginvestors because it allows them to buy and sell stocks and bonds from their PCs, cut commission costs, and gain ready access to market research, accounted in 1998 for morethan 20percent ofall securitiestransactions!…”