1.5 CONCLUSION

The classic twentieth-century historiography of political thought represents a field of complex and non-reductive dialogue between history of political thought and history of law in its multiple forms.

If we consider the possibilities for dialogue between history of political thought and history of international law in this new world of the twenty-first century, we have already seen that some of these developments mesh effect­ively with the concerns of historians of international law. One iteration of the international, and of the global, is indeed modern, a function of the modern state and its imperial reach, modern capital and modern technology. These are major themes both of history of political thought and of critical history of international law alike. The turn to the global has, however, brought with it a renewed interest in the Braudelian longue duree, a scale of time whose relationship to modernity is one of the key questions for global history, and a fortiori for global intellectual history.^[39] On the one hand it seems to offer the chance to break the back of modernity entirely and write a completely different kind of history, one that is ‘postmodern' in an entirely new sense. But on the other, it has no end point but the present, with the risk that its history either begs the question of modernity or becomes a genealogy of the modern in one form or another.

Similar challenges, and similar opportunities, face a longue duree history of political thought in a global frame.^[40] The historiographical creativity of the dialogue with law in twentieth-century history of political thought suggests, however, an alternative and more oblique way in. Instead of hitting the longue duree head on, we might think first about how to conceive the moyenne duree in a global frame, which could begin and end in any place or time. Here, the ‘inside out' approach of history of political thought to medieval and early modern Europe, with its attention to non-state forms of law as an essential constituent of the political, might be well and truly set free of its ties to Western modernity and in the process transformed. Such a transformation would nevertheless be open, as I have already implied, to intellectual trad­itions such as scripture or poetry, which tend to be more longue duree precisely because of the way in which they pull the outside inside narrative.^[41] Either way, there lies the possibility for new experiments in global historiography, both in political thought and in international law.

Established disciplines such as these tend to construct their outsides in ways that are both binary and ideological. But for an individual historian working within either political thought or international law, managing the inside and the outside of her story is a complex negotiation that cannot be reduced to one thing versus another. As we have seen, the binaries between law and politics, between history and philosophy, and between history and law, are not, in fact binaries, but triadic co-constructions of history, politics and law. And within each of these elements, there are different possible constructions available - different concepts of politics and the political, different kinds of history, different kinds of law. There is no one way in which either a historian of international law, or a historian of political thought, either may or should approach a text like The Law of War and Peace. It is the choice of the historian how best to create interpretative synergy between what her text is doing and what she is doing, to make a story that is resonant with meaning, be it legal or political. That does not mean that history of political thought and history of international law, in any form, will simply collapse into each other. The former's interest in political meaning inevitably pulls law out of law and into a story that is not purely of law's own making, however much it may acknow­ledge that law is also a story maker and a partner in creating the ‘outside' of that same story. The conversation between history of political thought and history of international law will continue to have some sharp edges. But the recognition of the mutual implication of history, politics and law gives indi­vidual historians room to breathe, and room for the broader conversation to continue.