Emer de Vattel and the Politics of Good Government: Constitutionalism, Small States and the International System

This book explores the history of the international order in the eighteenth and nineteenth century through a new study of Emer de Vattel’s Droit des gens (1758). Drawing on unpublished sources from European archives and libraries, the book offers an in-depth account of the reception of Vattel’s chief work. Vattel’s focus on the myth of good government became a strong argument for republicanism, the survival of small states, drafting constitutions and reform projects and fighting everyday battles for freedom in different geographical, linguistic and social contexts. The book complicates the picture of Vattel’s enduring success and usefulness, showing too how the work was published and translated to criticize and denounce the dangerousness of these ideas. In doing so, it opens up new avenues of research beyond histories of international law, political and economic thought.

For more than two hundred years Emer de Vattel’s Droit des gens has attracted the attention of historians, jurists and political philosophers. The uninterrupted discussion and success of this work have been accompanied by lively debates about the originality and relevance of its author’s ideas about crucial issues such as the position of the individual in international law, the right of war, the question of peace, republicanism, and the nature of the international order. The Droit des gens, originally published in Neuchâtel in 1758, has proved to be a text capable of crossing historical contexts and geographical space, in so doing becoming a bestseller of international law.