A Century of Anarchy?

Is what we got used to call the international community sliding back into anarchy as it prevailed in the era preceding the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand-Pact, and the establishment of the UN? In his impressive study Hendrik Simon demonstrates that this would be a wrong conclusion both with a view to our understanding of "the long 19th Century" and of what perhaps may be called the dialectical trinity of war, order, and peace in general. Simon's study opens up a new way of looking at the history of, and the issues at stake in, more recent aspirations to come to grips with the interplay between war and order. * Lothar Brock, Goethe University Frankfurt and Peace Research Institute Frankfurt *
It says a lot about societies what attitude toward violence they practice and accept. Throughout history, every use of international force has been accompanied by its justification. Breaches of international law are made to appear legal. Hendrik Simon's book helps to understand this paradox. Refuting the widespread proposition that states had a “free right to war” before 1920, it opens a view into the plurality of normative and political legitimation claims of interstate violence with unprecedented analytical acuity. Hendrik Simon's impressive study at the intersection of law, politics, and history serves to self-enlighten our society. * Miloš Vec, University of Vienna *
This book confronts a central myth of International Relations head-on: the myth that there existed a free right to go to war in the 19th century which was then replaced by legal restrictions of war in the 20th century. Simon shows that war was in need of justification, both legally and politically, throughout the 19th century and played a crucial role in the establishment of the modern international order. The myth of a free right to go to war was peddled by a small group of German militarists and perpetuated by realists and liberals alike - who used it to support their claims of anarchy and progress respectively. This is a carefully researched, rich and wide ranging, critical study highly recommended for all scholars interested in international relations, international law, and the history of the 19th century. * Beate Jahn, University of Sussex *
This exhaustively-researched study, located at the intersection of International Relations and International Law, turns an established orthodoxy on its head: The European 'long 19th Century', Hendrik Simon suggests, was not the pre-liberal era of an undisputed sovereign liberum ius ad bellum, but rather the precursor of a norm-governed international order. It was primarily significant voices in late Prussian and Imperial Germany's legal and political circles that struggled to superimpose the myth of the “free right to conduct warfare” upon a wider European reality that had decisively moved beyond it. Grounded in a genealogy of war justifications, the constructivist analysis takes the reader on a historical tour de force from the Vienna Congress, via the Eastern Question, Italian and German unification, to World War I, generating a striking revision of the standard argument in IR and IL. * Benno Teschke, University of Sussex *
This remarkable product of scholarship offers a genealogy of nineteenth-century discourses about war and the alleged freedom of states to wage it as they saw fit. Simon's genealogy relies on careful readings of a wide range of key legal, philosophical and historical texts. He begins with the French Revolution and proceeds through the Congress of Vienna to the unification of Germany and Italy, and the subsequent debates between realist and liberal thinkers. * Richard Ned Lebow, International Affairs *
If you set out to deconstruct a historical myth, you have to show how it really was (almost in a Rankeian sense). Hendrik Simon's book is an exemplar in erudition, in that he cites a wealth of contemporary literature. Through this, he reconstructs a legal discourse that was far richer — and far more legal, for that — than the traditional narrative allows. (...) His book is more than the sum of its part, a true monograph — and it is excellently written. A must-read for all who are interested in its subject matter! * Andreas von Arnauld, Walther Schücking Institute for International Law at Kiel University, in Laudatio for Delbrück Prize 2024 *
In this book, Hendrik Simon undertakes a fundamental historicization of norm research in International Relations by applying its findings on the contestation and further development of international norms and principles, almost all of which relate to the present since 1945, to the discourses on the legitimization of war in the long 19th century. The conflictual character in which the development of legal norms takes place becomes clear, but above all the intimate connection between conflict and the formation and reproduction of international order, which Hendrik Simon elegantly elaborates in this book. * Nicole Deitelhoff, Goethe University Frankfurt and Peace Research Institute Frankfurt *
A study distinguished not only by its masterful scholarly engagement with a complex subject, but also by an exceptional linguistic elegance that makes it a true pleasure to read. * Sebastian Graf von Kielmansegg, Kiel University, in Laudatio for Moltke Prize 2025 *
This is an iconoclastic book. You disagree with different authors, and you are very upfront about that. You highlight certain differences that you arrived at (...). I definitely recommend this book because it does a good job of engaging with different disciplines and doing this in a thoughtful way. So, the book is also recommended for its methodological approach. * Patryk I. Labuda, Central European University, in ESIL Peace and Security Podcast *
Hendrik Simon's study will undoubtedly become a reference point in debates on nineteenth-century international order, as well as the intellectual sources and blind spots of the IR discipline. While current trends in scholarship appear to favor either micro-sociological post-positivist observations or the positivist testing of variables using quantitative datasets, Simon's work emphasizes the continued necessity for studies with an encompassing, ambitious research question and a qualitative methodology capable of identifying broad tendencies across geographic and temporal boundaries. * Eric Sangar, Sciences Po Lille and CERAPS, Université de Lille, in Perspectives on Politics *
The study provides an extremely knowledgeable reconstruction of the resulting intense debates among international lawyers and philosophers, which have largely been forgotten today, despite their obvious relevance to the current competing visions of international order. In this sense, the work is indispensable for anyone concerned with the question of the legitimacy of war. The historical narratives developed in the 19th century remain highly relevant today. * Hubert Zimmermann, Philipps University Marburg, in Politische Vierteljahresschrift/German Political Science Quarterly *
This a remarkable work of scholarship that offers a genealogy of discourses in the nineteenth century about war and the alleged freedom of states to wage it as they saw fit ...Simon's revisionist account is compelling and has important implications for the substance and theory of international law and international relations. It also demonstrates the power of historical understandings to shape current thinking and practices. * Richard Ned Lebow, King's College London, University of Cambridge and Dartmouth College, in International Affairs *