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Acknowledgements

This book grew out of several papers I delivered at various conferences over the last three years, and articles I published in different journals. Above all, I want to thank my wife Angelika for her almost stoic indifference when I was continuously absent-minded, especially during shared meals, conversations, and whenever she had something important to tell me. With kind amusement, she allowed me to work on this book which, in her opinion, has one major disadvantage: it is not going to make me rich. I am grateful to our children Clemens, Antonia and Valentina for tons of hugs, kisses, and laughter. The Stoics conceived humans as surrounded by a series of concentric circles, one of them being one’s immediate family. I realized the truth hidden in Edmund Burke’s famous statement that affections begin at home, and that we should not forget to ‘love the little platoon we belong to in society’, as it is ‘the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love … to mankind.’

I am indebted to many people for their help and continuous support, sometimes for years, especially to Sharon Anderson-Gold, Gideon Baker, Moritz Csáky, Lisa Ellis, Bardo Fassbender, Jörg Fisch, Pauline Kleingeld, Chris Laursen, Rebecka Lettevall, Herta Nagl-Docekal, August Reinisch, Karl-Heinz Ribisch, Garrett W. Sheldon and, above all, Howard Williams. I am grateful to University of Wales Press and their staff for their helpful and patient supervising of this book project.

Several chapters are based on previous papers and articles: Chapter 2 was published in the Journal of the History of International Law, 10 (2008), 181–209. Chapter 3 is a modified version of a paper delivered at a conference in Frankfurt am Main, and subsequently published in German. ‘Late eighteenth-century international legal theory’ grew out of a conference at Tours, October 2007. Chapter 6 is based on ‘Immigration and sovereignty. Normative approaches in the history of international legal theory (Pufendorf – Vattel – Bluntschli – Verdross)’, published in Austrian

Review of International and European Law, 11 (2006), 3–22, and presented at a conference in Tilburg, The Netherlands, May 2007.

I am fully aware of the fact that a book like this has its limitations. The range of publications I have consulted is limited, including only relevant ones in English and German. As English is not my native tongue, I should like to ask my readers’ forgiveness, still hoping that I have succeeded in presenting my ideas clearly and intelligibly in spite of this fact. In any case, I trust that this book is a convincing example of what in the first chapter I will call intellectual cosmopolitanism, and that my readers will be able to feel my fascination with the intellectually vibrant and fascinating eighteenth century.