The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State [Kindle Edition]
Author: Philip Allott | Language: English | ISBN: B001FB63KY | Format: PDF, EPUB
The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State
Download for free books The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State from mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link Globalization has become so familiar that it's the target even of street demonstrations from Seattle to Genoa. It challenges traditional social structures, as international systems (such as the European Union, the WTO or the global capital markets) become more powerful than states and governments. This book recalls the traditional social structures to study and develop ways to meet the current urgent global challenges. Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State
Download for free books The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State from mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link Globalization has become so familiar that it's the target even of street demonstrations from Seattle to Genoa. It challenges traditional social structures, as international systems (such as the European Union, the WTO or the global capital markets) become more powerful than states and governments. This book recalls the traditional social structures to study and develop ways to meet the current urgent global challenges. Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State
- File Size: 4127 KB
- Print Length: 452 pages
- Simultaneous Device Usage: Up to 4 simultaneous devices, per publisher limits
- Publisher: Cambridge University Press (December 9, 2002)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B001FB63KY
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
- Lending: Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,280,973 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
Edit of21 Dec 07 to add links and reassert importance of this work.
Of the 1000+ books I have reviewed on Amazon, this is one of a handful that can be considered truly revolutionary. Three others that come instantly to mind are those by Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, William Greider, The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy, and E.O. Wilson, The Future of Life.
This book is not an easy read. The author, a Professor of Law in the University of Cambridge, wrote an earlier work, Eunomia: New Order for a New World, that has remained similar obscure, and that is a pity, for what I see here is a truly brilliant mind able to suggest that the Congress of Vienna, the current law of nations, and the de-humanization of state to state relations, isolating the internal affairs and inhumanities of state from global public morality and indignation, are the greatest travesty in human history.
The author joins William Greider in suggesting that the state as a corporate personality is as immoral (and irrational in terms of natural law) as is the corporate personality that allows corporations to treat humans as "goods.
I have had this book on perpetual loan from the library, probably becasue I am compelled to re-read it, but I am so ambivalent about it, that I can't bring myself to give it permanent place on my bookshelf. I won't be able to resolve my ambivalence about the book here, but here are some of my comments both on style and substance.
ON STYLE: Along with its prequel "Eunomia" "Health of Nations" (as a quick use of the "Look Inside" function will reveal) stands out for its unusual stylistic conceit, which is particularly unorthodox for the discipline of international law. The risks Allott takes in this regard are actually admirable and inspiring. Because of the absurd civil law vertige that itnernational lawyers have a role in the development of positive law, the discipline tends to encourage formulaic jurisprudence of armchair judiciary. In my view the discipline is important enough that it deserves more "genre" works that explore aspects of the subject with original voices and techniques, and until C. Mieville writes the Great IL Science Fiction Novel, Prof. Allott's two books will probably stand as the most ambitious recent attempts at genre-bending in the discipline (including recent works by D. Kennedy or P. Sands, for example, and I can't think of any older models of hybrid genres since C. Schmitt's "Land and Sea" which we can't quite claim for our discipline anyway). For this reason alone, I would recommend the book to anyone seeking to spend an evening reading outside of a narrow or joyless doctrinal specialization. But though this work-- in turns aphoristic and analytic, Nietzschean and Wittgensteinian-- is original in form, its argument doesn't quite take advantage of any of the virtues of this form.
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