Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

Abstract

Commerce does not guarantee or secure peace in a world of sovereign states; rather, commerce represents for Montesquieu an alternative to a world of sovereign states, of closed political communities—a model of peaceful social cooperation that requires laws and conventions, certainly, but of a transnational, transpolitical kind. We now understand the meaning of Montesquieu’s notion that the model for law is not nomos (the custom or way of a particular society or community) but something more universal, a concept of order or structure that is prior to and more fundamental than nomos. However, while implicit in the idea of law, the transnational, transpolitical order must be built out of the diverse nomoi of existing political communities. Commerce, by illustrating how stateless merchants have maintained an order among themselves to sustain exchange across the most diverse societies, helps point the way.

First Page

693

Volume

31

Publication Date

2006

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