The real history of the laws of war in the modern world has been a story of rationalizing and channeling the military power of states by connecting that power to a set of moral ideas about the use of force. This story is simultaneously a confession of weakness and an extraordinary accomplishment. Many like Sumner and Pancho Villa have mocked the effort to even try. Irrational power is a terrifying thing, and containing it, even at the margins, is no small feat.
Moyn’s book illuminates one way in which the process of milling power into ideals, and ideals into power, is taking place once again. It warns us that the rise of humanizing standards is not a new and unalloyed moral triumph, but a new iteration of the close developmental relationship between the force of powerful states, on the one hand, and the law that emerges in dialogue with that force, on the other. The availability of stunningly precise modern military technologies (technologies that we produced, to be sure) has yielded “humanity” as a component of the most recent legal regime to serve (partially) the interests of power.
Of course, if it were not so, if humanization standards did not align to some extent with the interests of powerful states, they would not be the law. Our legal order rests on the consent of those states, and so it could hardly be otherwise. The best the law can do is reflect our best selves, though surely it often mirrors our worst. Law does not come to us as if from The Good Place. It will not rescue us. It is us. It should hardly be surprising to find it no better than we are.
The truth is that Moyn’s book is not really about the law and its history, except more than by a glancing blow. His is a book with more explosive munitions and a higher priority target, but it lacks precision-guided coding. The book is not satisfied to confine its attack to the field of legal history (of the international variety or otherwise), but aims instead to disrupt the supply chains sustaining the blinkered moral gaze of an entire worldview. Until recently, state military power routinely included law-abiding force of jaw-droppingly brutal proportions. Now lawyers routinely insist on proportional targeting that minimizes civilian harm that was once routine. Moyn’s powerful claim is that we should not think the latter regime has abandoned the older legal project of enabling state military power. And he warns against the dystopian future of high-tech weaponry in which a handful of powerful states are able to dominate the planet and police its conduct in what he calls a “chilling” future of “war beyond killing” (p. 9).