Legal Scholarship and Doctrines of Private Law, 13Th-18th Centuries Book

Arguably schmitt's best work. he dissects the greek work "nomos" and explains that it has a tripartite meaning. it refers to the three conditions of possibility for having the rule of law: the acquisition of land, the cultivation of that land, and the distribution of profits from the land...all rooted in a people that thereby becomes sovereign over that land. as peoples began to establish their sovereignty, and thus develop the legitimacy needed to draft laws to bind themselves, they became aware of their positions in the world with respect to other peoples. the first major civilizations, eventually, fought with each other - "wars of annihilation," he called them, because there was a still inchoate understanding of the entire world order of peoples...the "nomos" of the earth. as peoples developed and we finally got to the era of nation-states, different peoples learned how to at least respect their enemies, even if they were enemies. we even got so far as to start collaborating on some international principles. but we never got a fully coherent "international law," in his view. one of the reasons why? well, eventually the nice and neat nation-state world order (which obviously didn't apply to the entire world) started to break down as some spaces were used as spaces of "exception" - the gulags, the concentration camps, etc. these spaces has people on land, but those people were not "sovereign" over their land. they were criminals, or refugees, and were living in spaces that nations relied on but that didn't fit into the nation-state model, for all the obvious reasons. so schmitt realized that his ideal nomos of the earth was already breaking down...and that with the rise of spheres of influence coming from the US and USSR, we were in danger of slipping back into an era of empires and wars of annihilation. sound familiar?