Francis Lieber on Institutional Liberty, Secession, and the Modern State

Schoen, Brian

doi:10.1086/711034

Cited by 1 publication

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“…The inaugural professor of political science and history in the United States (Columbia University, 1865), Lieber is taken to be “America’s first systemic theorist of the state,” his work foundational to “an institutionalized, academic discipline” (Farr 1990, 1028; Gunnell 1993). Lieber was also central to the emergence of American political thought (Ross 1991; Schoen 2020) and the development of the modern laws of war (Kinsella 2011; Paust 2001; Witt 2012). His 1863 General Orders 100 (GO100), written and issued during the American Civil War (1861–1865), was the first modern codification of the laws of war.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Settler Empire and the United States: Francis Lieber on the Laws of War

Kinsella

2022

Am Polit Sci Rev

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Histories of political science and of the laws of war identify the nineteenth-century scholar Francis Lieber as their modern founder. His 1863 General Orders 100 codified the modern laws of war, internationalizing his political thought. Yet, relatively unremarked is that Lieber wrote his foundational texts during U.S. settler colonization, which he justified in whole. I argue that GO100 facilitated settler colonial violence by defining modern war as a public war, arrogating it to sovereign states; distinguishing revenge from retaliation, attributing revenge to the “savage”; and elevating a certain racialized/gendered governance, ascribing it to the Cis-Caucasian race. Producing Native peoples and Native wars as lacking in the proper characteristics of sovereign belligerency resulted in a subordination of status and a legitimation of exterminatory tactics that were subsequently universalized and (re)internationalized through GO100’s determinative influence on the laws of war. Tracing GO100 further exposes the founding of the discipline in Native peoples’ dispossession and extermination.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Settler Empire and the United States: Francis Lieber on the Laws of War

Kinsella

2022

Am Polit Sci Rev

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Francis Lieber on Institutional Liberty, Secession, and the Modern State

Cited by 1 publication

References 16 publications

Settler Empire and the United States: Francis Lieber on the Laws of War

Settler Empire and the United States: Francis Lieber on the Laws of War

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