Whiggish International Law

Download or read book Whiggish International Law written by Christopher R. Rossi and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-03-25 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International law’s turn to history in the Americas receives invigorated refreshment with Christopher Rossi’s adaptation of the insightful and inter-disciplinary teachings of the English School and Cambridge contextualists to problems of hemispheric methodology and historiography. Rossi sheds new light on abridgments of history and the propensity to construct and legitimize whiggish understandings of international law based on simplified tropes of liberal and postcolonial treatments of the Monroe Doctrine. Central to his story is the retelling of the Monroe Doctrine by its supreme early twentieth century interlocutor, Elihu Root and other like-minded internationalists. Rossi’s revival of whiggish international law cautions against the contemporary tendency to re-read history with both eyes cast on the ideological present as a justification for misperceived historical sequencing.