I have had this book on perpetual loan from the library, probably becasue I am compelled to re-read it, but I am so ambivalent about it, that I can't bring myself to give it permanent place on my bookshelf. I won't be able to resolve my ambivalence about the book here, but here are some of my comments both on style and substance.
ON STYLE: Along with its prequel "Eunomia" "Health of Nations" (as a quick use of the "Look Inside" function will reveal) stands out for its unusual stylistic conceit, which is particularly unorthodox for the discipline of international law. The risks Allott takes in this regard are actually admirable and inspiring. Because of the absurd civil law vertige that itnernational lawyers have a role in the development of positive law, the discipline tends to encourage formulaic jurisprudence of armchair judiciary. In my view the discipline is important enough that it deserves more "genre" works that explore aspects of the subject with original voices and techniques, and until C. Mieville writes the Great IL Science Fiction Novel, Prof. Allott's two books will probably stand as the most ambitious recent attempts at genre-bending in the discipline (including recent works by D. Kennedy or P. Sands, for example, and I can't think of any older models of hybrid genres since C. Schmitt's "Land and Sea" which we can't quite claim for our discipline anyway). For this reason alone, I would recommend the book to anyone seeking to spend an evening reading outside of a narrow or joyless doctrinal specialization. But though this work-- in turns aphoristic and analytic, Nietzschean and Wittgensteinian-- is original in form, its argument doesn't quite take advantage of any of the virtues of this form. Its propositions are numbered paragraphs that begin in the mode of a 19th century treatise, but soon reveal (that they might as well be jumbled at random (like Cortozar's literary "Hopscotch" or Lindqvist's book on Bombing). This realization actually opens up some possibilities, and Allott would be entitled to work through issues through a range of modernist rhetorical techniques, and alternative modes of critical engagement. But instead of recognizing its intervention as a creative pastiche of the kinds of master treatises written by, e.g., Weber, Jhering, or Bluntschli (and unlike say, Vanageim's earnest but stylistically ironic "Declaration"), Allott actually pretends to their "objectivity." It is also self-consciously an attempt to project "late style": it is a non-academic book, lacking footnotes, and carries the ambition of scope that only a full life in a discipline can justify. Allott an elder-statesman of the IL establishment, now retired, has the credentials for such an attempt, but this work itself does not intimate this practical wisdom. His aphoristic leaps from Nietzschean peak to peak, fail to disclose insights gained by a life lived "inside" the discipline; his manifestos against monoliths called "Vattel" and "Westphalia" seem more appropriate to immature scholars (myself included) gesturing toward issues they do not quite understand. Finally, and as a bridge to the substantive issues, Allott uses evaluative terms as though they were neutral, lending no reflexivity to his own constructs: "pathology" describes real deviations from desired norms, "health" describes a desired reality, and there are relatively simple discursive choices separating tragedy from utopia. It turns out that all that power/knowledge stuff is not so troubling as long as good people possess both. Or else, there is nothing actually self-critical about the Health of Nations.
ON SUBSTANCE: Aside from quoting the Zarathustran pronouncement "the earth shall yet become a house of healing," Allott also does little to reveal why he chooses "health" as his master discourse. It might have been useful in an age where "rights" or "security" tend to occupy the field to be explicit about the stakes involved in extending the notion of "salus populi" (health/safety of the people) to the emerging global community. If not the Roman Salus Populi, he might have productively discussed (in lne with the earler Eunomia) the ancient Greek metaphor of "health" positively health (hygieia) and negatively disease (nosos), or pathology (pathe) and as explanations for political predicaments such as "stasis" (civil strife) and faction, both in terms of Aristotle's "bios politikos" and beyond (Sophocles' Antigone, and in several works of Euripides, Plato, Demosthenes). Hygieia was not given the same prominence of place to salus populi, but according to an interesting account (K. Kalimtzis, "Aristotle on Political Enmity and Disease: An Inquiry into Stasis" SUNY 2000), a concept that can be analogized is perhaps Homonoia (political friendship). Thus following the "Eunomia" (legal order) and entitle this work ("international society") "Hygieia" (health) or "Homonia" (harmony) (I am temted by an awkward pun by combining them into "Hegemonia.") Also, without actually sayinf salus populi, IR constructivists and Security Studies theorists have actually revived the analogy between "health" and "security." In his book "Security, Identity, and Interests" Bill McSweeney notes that "Disease is to health what material threat is to security; a significant hazard which cannot be ignored, but not its defining characteristic." Security and Rights reinterpreted from the model of positive-"health" (prevention) and negative-"disease" (pathology)" but become "welfare" rather than "freedom" ("state sovereignty" or "individual liberty"). But what are the limits of a positive conception of either? Unlike the constitutional image of the "balance" (between competing rights, or liberty v. security) internationalists tend to invest in a "master" concept of "rights or "security" and extend this indefinitely to every sphere of social life. Of course, as master discourses, these end up on one hand analytically useless, and on the other hand completely unhelpful in determining the allocation of scarce resources.
Again, there is nothing self-critical or self-searching about the Health of Nations. In a recent review, M. Koskenniemi notes that "References to Foucault and Marx are among the few that appear throughout [Allott's Health of Nations]. Surely we need to remember what they wrote about the use of ideas such as "health" or "happiness" as names for subtle forms of oppression." 16(2) Eur J Int Law 255-297 (2005). Indeed, when Foucault speak of "regulatory controls" that take charge of the health and life of populations (p. 183; History of Sexuality, vol. 1, p. 145), this is not without ambivalence. Similarly, Georges Canguilhem has demonstrated that notions such as "preservation," "regulation," adaptation" and "normality" are evaluative terms. In that context, the biological "normal" (as opposed to the "pathological") is a concept of value and not necessarily a statistical reality. To be sure, Allott doesn't seem to think the "norm" is a "statistical reality" but at least compelling as something "yet to come." Yet his prophetic side proceeds with as little caution that (to paraphrase an inimical prophet)"whoever invokes health/happiness cheats."
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