What do we gain from thinking about international law as a belief system? To appreciate what Jean d'Aspremont has done in this slim volume, it may be helpful to begin with the opposite question: What do we lose from thinking of international law as a belief system? On one level, the answer to this question is that, as is the case with much scholarship dedicated to demystifying the historical and political contingencies of hegemonic systems, we stand to lose a measure of our naïveté about the foundations and legitimating discourses at the heart of today's international legal system. On another, more fundamental level, the answer to this question is that we stand to lose our certainty about the basic rationalism of today's mechanisms of international law. In place of this certainty, we catch a glimpse of the way in which international law is permeated with a type of religious logic that functions to inoculate its doctrines, mechanisms, and agents from particular types of critical scrutiny. In other words, this system functions by creating “an illusion of rational consensus around law that is meant to isolate law from power, morality, antagonism and the plurality of interests” that undergird its genesis and real-world application (11).

Both of these answers point to the importance and timeliness of d'Aspremont's book. In an era in which interest (both academic and public) in the foundations of international legal mechanisms has blossomed,Footnote ¹International Law as a Belief System furnishes an important lens into the complex dynamics of authority and legitimation at play among the legal professionals who operate within this realm. D'Aspremont explains that this is a book written for international lawyers, with the aim of “providing new reflexive tools” that will allow them “to liberate themselves, albeit temporarily, from inherited patterns of legal thought they have been trained to reproduce and respond to” (117). However, this book contains insights of value to more than just international lawyers; the subtle patterns and logics that d'Aspremont unearths will prove highly illuminating to scholars working in fields such as critical legal theory and political theology—fields that have long been dedicated to troubling easy delineations between law, politics, and religion.

Interestingly, and notwithstanding its title, this book does not engage the topic of religion in a sustained way. Indeed, d'Aspremont enters into the field of religious studies only so far as to distinguish his own “generic” conception of belief systems from more overtly “religious” belief systems (7). Though scholars of religion might lament this missed opportunity to bring the richness of religious studies to bear on this important issue (d'Aspremont gestures to some of this relevant scholarship in a lengthy footnote), his generic conception of belief systems does the analytical footwork he requires to lay bare the particular legal and extralegal dynamics whereby “truth or meaning is acquired neither by reason (rationalism) nor by experience (empiricism) but by the deployment of certain transcendental validators that are unjudged and unproved rationally or empirically” (5). The bulk of d'Aspremont's analysis consists of highlighting the characteristics that imbue particular legal doctrines with the status of a transcendental validator. These characteristics, which also largely structure the chapters of the book, are “ruleness,” “imagined genealogy,” and “self-referentiality” (31). In short, particular legal doctrines come to occupy the role of transcendental validators when they become taken for granted as a constraining set of rules reflecting the mandates of legal instruments that are “self-referential”—that is, instruments that have achieved sufficient political buy-in to “explain their own formation and functioning” without recourse to mechanisms beyond their own fundamental doctrines (31).

The circular quality of d'Aspremont's threefold framework of ruleness, imagined genealogy, and self-referentiality is not accidental; his framework is designed to capture a tautological dynamic that is intrinsic to the system itself. In walking readers through this complex dynamic, d'Aspremont creates the possibility for a temporary suspension of its obfuscations, thus opening a window into the various extrajudicial “sites of struggle” that undergird and perpetuate this system (107). Though these sites of struggle do not ultimately serve as the central focus of the book, d'Aspremont provides some compelling examples of “interventions” that are simultaneously formative of and obfuscated by today's discourses of international law (113). The 1933 Montevideo Convention on Rights and Duties of States, for example, has achieved its current status as “a ‘reflex’ for anyone articulating a legal claim about statehood or recognition” only through a particular confluence of historical and political contingencies that have subsequently become occluded by the Convention's own combination of ruleness, imagined genealogy, and self-referentiality (80).

On the other side of d'Aspremont's disenchanting suspension awaits a liberatory reorientation that has the potential not merely to disrupt certain engrained ways of conceptualizing and conducting law but, more dramatically, to disrupt the subtle hegemony of “a liberal pattern of legal thought inherited from the Enlightenment” (116). D'Aspremont's depiction of this liberal pattern of thought and the “anti-theoretical” nature of its functioning hearkens to the work of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (63). In a manner similar to Adorno and Horkheimer in their seminal Dialectic of Enlightenment,Footnote ² so d'Aspremont endeavors to shed critical light on a phenomenon that is simultaneously self-obfuscating and steeped in claims of rationalized calculability. This work is extremely important because, as d'Aspremont reminds us, lawyers’ reflexive faith in the inherent rationalism of international law has tended to divert critical scrutiny away from the hidden patterns of their modes of legal reasoning and toward “doctrinal” and “empirical” investigations that draw upon, and thus further entrench, the very patterns of legal reasoning that are in need of scrutiny (14–15). In a context in which even the investigative mechanisms of international law function to perpetuate an unreflexive devotion to liberal modes of thought derived from the Enlightenment, a critical theoretical analysis of the sort that d'Aspremont provides in this book is indispensable.

The timely yet extremely complex nature of d'Aspremont's analysis raises the question of the intended audience for this book. D'Aspremont repeatedly proclaims his primary audience to be international lawyers, and it is certainly the case that the extremely academic quality of d'Aspremont's writing makes it difficult to imagine suggesting this book to an undergraduate student or even to an informed public readership. Indeed, in the book's very final pages, d'Aspremont himself wonders whether even his intended audience of lawyers will be up to the task of navigating this project, ultimately proposing that “the consolidation of a readership that is both theoretically aware and doctrinally apt” may very well be a necessary starting point for the project itself (123). It is perhaps worth considering whether it would have been fruitful for d'Aspremont to have articulated this important analysis in a way that would reach out to a variety of engaged readers rather than entreating the emergence of an extremely select, perhaps nonexistent, audience of international lawyers. Notwithstanding this missed opportunity, International Law as a Belief System presents those with the wherewithal to engage it with a rich and compelling opening into some of the most hidden and surprising intricacies of contemporary international law.