Part intellectual history and part contemporary review, The Spirit of International Law ranges across the series of cyclical processes and dialectics in international law over the past five centuries to assess its current prospects as a viable legal system.

Focuses on international law as the means of regulating and influencing international behavior. This work shows it to be a system unique in its nature - nonterritorial but secular, cosmopolitan, and traditional. It ranges across the series of cyclical processes and dialectics in international law to assess its prospects as a viable legal system.