In the spirit of ‘thinking through the international' and reflecting on the ways of (historical and juridical) seeing that might enliven (or temper) such think­ing, I want to ask a question and make a small plea.

The question concerns what international legal history might look like ‘after method'. I am happy to wear, for these purposes, the too-seamless itinerary assumed by the question; it's not as if, after all, many of the international lawyers who wrote history in the past did not think about method.

But while much of the chapter describes international law's encounter with method and how the field might look after that encounter, I want to issue a plea concerning the limits of method. Maybe this plea is just another array of questions: Is there method that is not method? Or is method all method? Or, what lies beyond method (or ‘after method') that makes a particular piece of history or legal scholarship attractive to us? The simplest way to put this is to say that when I read international law or fiction, or watch a film, I quite often have a sense - sometimes within minutes - that I am in good or bad hands. And a consideration of this sense cannot be exhausted by an attention to method (or ‘method' does not seem quite the right word to capture our intuitions about these things, or, if you like, our intuitions about intuition).^[134] I am not certain how I would describe this quality - I have settled on literary virtue (absent the strong moral implication) but sometimes it appears as a species of writerly ethics, sometimes as a ‘way of seeing' and, no doubt, sometimes it really does map quite neatly onto a set of methodological prescriptions.^[135] Warning: for those who don't share this experience (or think the explanations for it are banal), the last part of the chapter will have been in vain.