From Situated Freedom to Plausible Worlds

Abstract

This volume has provided a potent reminder of the need for a cautious and intelligent embrace of contingency in explaining the past and framing hopes for the future of international law. The contingent, properly understood, is neither the utterly random nor the wholly determined. At its best, interest in contingency expresses a commitment to a theory of situated freedom: a desire to reach a proper sense of what options are available to us, neither conceding to the claims of unbending necessity nor pretending to an unbound and utopian sense of anarchic possibility that generally collapses into its opposite when it crashes into a recalcitrant world. The chapter closes with some thoughts about the scholarly uses of counterfactuality.