Introduction by Samuel Moyn, Yale University David Kennedy has long been the leader and organizer of what he famously called a ‘new stream’ in international legal scholarship. Few scholars can boast of influence in an expansive global network of committed and creative scholars; fewer still can look back and say they have brought about a deparochialization and intellectualization of a whole field of inquiry and the creation of space for a panoply of new theoretical options within it—almost from scratch. But in international legal theory, Kennedy can justifiably claim to have done both. In A World of Struggle, Kennedy extends his intellectual contributions over the years, and the result has already been canonized as one of the touchstone books in the field. It has also attracted considerable public attention—prominent intellectual Pankaj Mishra cited it as one of the best books of the year in both The Guardian and The New York Times in 2016. A World of Struggle offers an elaborate and fascinating account of expertise in general and in international affairs and law in particular. And it does so with clarity and grace. As I have argued elsewhere,[1] A World of Struggle itself anticipates the struggle that has characterized its reception—notably a range of possible responses to the extremity to which Kennedy is willing to push his discursive account of expertise and how central he makes that account, in turn, to real outcomes. In a world now much more visibly in crisis than even when the book appeared, the struggle of experts to rule that Kennedy depicts appears more consequential than ever. Correspondingly, the same is true in turn of our second-order struggle with Kennedy’s account. Fortunately, H-Diplo has recruited three insightful reviewers who offer the next insightful round. To begin the symposium, Christopher Casey, a legal historian, frames the discussion. Providing an excellent and lucid summary of A World of Struggle, Casey focuses particularly on Kennedy’s depiction of the disenchanted faith of contemporary experts. He wonders, in particular, how long international lawyers have assumed their characteristic spiritual stance. As he says, even as Kennedy substantiates his story here and there, A World of Struggle is mainly focused on the broad strokes of a model, leaving historical experts to ponder—and perhaps, further establish and verify for themselves—what the main phases of the rise of expert rule have been and what its specifics look like across space. Next, international relations scholar Tanisha Fazal weighs in. Fazal helpfully situates Kennedy’s venture in relation to important recent impulses in her field. She also draws attention to the all-important focus on the distributional consequences of expert rule in Kennedy’s account, which are often neglected in other fancy theories of international affairs. She wonders how far there is symmetry between the account of expertise Kennedy illustrates in international affairs and domestic policy and legal work that likewise bears on distributional outcomes. Lastly and provocatively, Fazal asks whether Kennedy’s critique of experts requires any chastening or revision now that, in what many take to be a new age of ‘populism,’ expert rule seems to be under comprehensive challenge and threat. Penultimately, international legal theorist Umut Özsu brings a materialist critique to Kennedy’s discursive framing of global expertise. In parallel to Tor Krever’s Marxist critique of A World of Struggle in the New Left Review,[2] Özsu’s hard-hitting and thought-provoking approach both reflects a new wave of materialist commitment and is original and unique in its own right. Forcefully written, Özsu’s argument links the intellectually discursive theory of expertise Kennedy deploys to a political risk of defeatist or quietist practice—as if more significant acknowledgment of, or attention to, extra-discursive and extra-legal factors in generating global outcomes is likely to pair better with political mobilization. Needless to say, these are suggestions very much worth considering. Finally, Kennedy responds. Participants: David Kennedy is Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School where he teaches international law, international economic policy, legal theory, law and development and European law. He holds a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School at Tufts University and a J.D. from Harvard. Kennedy is the author of numerous books and articles including: The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism (Princeton University Press, 2004); Of War and Law (Princeton University Press, 2006); The Canon of American Legal Thought, edited with William Fisher, (Princeton University Press, 2006); Law and Economics with Chinese Characteristics: Institutions for Promoting Development in the 21st Century, edited with Joseph Stiglitz, (Oxford University Press, 2013) and A World of Struggle: How Power, Law and Expertise Shape Global Political Economy (Princeton University Press, 2016). His research uses interdisciplinary materials from sociology and social theory, economics and history to explore issues of global governance, development policy and the nature of professional expertise. Samuel Moyn is Professor of Law and Professor of History at Yale University. Previously, he taught at Columbia and Harvard Universities. He is the author of books on European intellectual history and international and global history, and for a decade worked on the origins and trajectory of international human rights politics. His newest book is Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Harvard University Press, 2018). Tanisha Fazal is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Her scholarship focuses on sovereignty, international law, and armed conflict. Fazal’s current research analyzes the effect of improvements in medical care in conflict zones on the long-term costs of war. She is the author of State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation (Princeton University Press, 2007). Her second book, Wars of Law: Unintended Consequences in the Regulation of Armed Conflict, is forthcoming with Cornell University Press. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as the British Journal of Political Science, Daedalus, International Organization, International Security, International Studies Review and Security Studies. She has been a fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. Christopher Casey is a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Law and History at New York University’s School of Law. His research focuses on the impact of mass migration and efforts to protect nationals abroad on the development of international investment and human rights law in the twentieth century. Umut Özsu is an assistant professor of law and legal studies at Carleton University. He is a scholar of public international law and the history and theory of international law. He is the author of Formalizing Displacement: International Law and Population Transfers (Oxford University Press, 2015), and is currently writing a book about the legal dimensions of the post-1945 wave of decolonization.

Review by Christopher Casey, New York University, School of Law In 1983, Roberto Unger, the doyen of the critical legal studies movement, concluded that legal experts were “like a priesthood that had lost their faith and kept their jobs” and who “stood in tedious embarrassment before cold altars.” David Kennedy disagrees. Expanding upon Unger to include experts in general, Kennedy argues, “Governance by expertise is rule through ruthless struggle among experts who have retained their faith and expanded their jobs. Theirs is an ecumenical, eclectic and disenchanted faith” (20). A World of Struggle is a study of how those practitioners of ecumenical, eclectic, and disenchanted faiths have come to govern the world and severely limit the possibilities of contemporary global society. “The more we understand what experts do,” asserts Kennedy, “the clearer it becomes that global dysfunction arises … from expertise: from the global knowledge practices for their differentiation, interaction, and management” (29). Kennedy’s book sketches out a theory of epistemological struggle. Eschewing abstract group categorizations to escape the connotative heft of more common identifiers, Kennedy places at the center of his account “people with projects,” defining a project as “something a person wants to achieve or obtain” (67). Gone are loaded abstract actors like ‘states,’ ‘labor,’ ‘capital’ and the abstract subjects of desire like ‘interest,’ ‘advantage,’ and ‘power’ that scholars often clumsily place at the center of economic or political theory. People, for Kennedy, have wants. Those wants are not necessarily rational, self-interested, or consistent. Kennedy argues that this analytic choice is necessary to denaturalize the systemic analyses that plague contemporary academic discussions of the global order. “Beginning with people rather than the many entities into which they might be organized—nations, corporations, governments, religions—foregrounds the plasticity of these institutional forms” (66) and, if one takes Kennedy’s arguments seriously, their hollowness. With his description of the world in place, Kennedy turns to the overlooked actors at the center of global struggle: experts. Kennedy is concerned more with “the work experts do [than] the specialized knowledge they bring to bear” (108). Experts, he argues, do ‘background work,’ which is to say they interpret history, interests, and precedents for leaders and citizens. They set the stage with history and precedent, they write the introduction to the play, and then deciders act. They then demarcate the realm of possible action, they tell the deciders what they most certainly can and cannot do, articulating principles, standards, and rules that limit legitimate actions. In sum, they create the context in which deciders decide; “Background experts stand between the objective observation of facts and the subjective exercise of discretion.” Yet experts are not disinterested individuals. They too are people with projects. But by grounding their interests in the objective observation of facts, they “can pursue projects with some plausible deniability of agency” (111). The most successful experts, like the best set designers, are those that remain unseen. We see deciders deciding, but what we do not often see is the scene setting and script writing that creates and limits the possibilities of decision. The implications of Kennedy’s theory of ‘background work,’ are compelling. Mel Brooks may have claimed that it was ‘good to be the king,’ but in Kennedy’s telling, kings are bound by the contexts created by experts. Indeed, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Presidents John F. Kennedy, and George W. Bush, in the author’s telling, were all constrained by the knowledge work of expertise (113). Indeed, being “the decider” is itself a kind of assertion reliant upon the retrospective assertions of experts, who use the past to set the parameters for the next struggle (113). Kennedy’s purpose, then, is to highlight the “discretion of experts—their freedom to argue and decide one thing rather than another—and the potential to interpret theirs as the work of decision” (136). In Kennedy’s telling, it is experts who are ‘the deciders,’ but they are also the ones who deny their role in deciding. Experts decide, but in their own conceit that they are merely interpreters of facts and figures, feel their souls clean. Meanwhile, the king reads from a script prepared by experts against a scene set by experts in a theatre build by experts and is then critiqued and condemned by experts. At most, the king gets to improvise a few lines, but improvise against an elaborately constructed context. Perhaps it is not so good to be the king, a figure who bears the moral weight of decision without actually having decided much of anything. Kennedy, it seems, has transmogrified princes and presidents into scapegoats and patsies. Experts believe they are not deciding when they are. Kings believe they are deciding when they are not. Belief, faith, doubt, and disenchantment are at the heart of Kennedy’s analysis of how expertise becomes useful in a world of struggle. The function of expertise is not to provide certainty, but rather to provide ambiguity. “One would expect a field to fall out of use as it loses decisive clarity,” observes Kennedy, but instead “the more complex and indecisive the expertise, the more useful it has become” (153). As ideological positions and frameworks within a field fail to provide certainty, fields become disenchanted. Practitioners of international law, for example, instead of dogmatically adhering to positivism or naturalism, become conversant in both but adherents of neither. Dogmas become disenchanted tools which savvy practitioners mobilize to their own ends. Importantly, however, as fields lose coherence, they become useful for people advocating a range of projects. The boundaries of the field, instead of being defined by content, are more often defined by style and common sense. But, then, what motivates experts to remain within the boundaries field? What keeps the practitioners practicing when they know so much of their expertise does little in the way of providing certainty? Kennedy’s answer is faith. The dogmas may have gone. The faith may have become ecumenical. But faith in the ends of a field or discipline remains. Peace and order remain the ends of international law, and practitioners of that art continue to believe in the ultimate potential of their field to lead the world to paradise, regardless of their opinions of naturalism or positivism. But when did the faith of experts became disenchanted and ecumenical? Is the answer field specific? Did international law become disenchanted sometime in the late-nineteenth century? Did history become disenchanted sometime in the late-twentieth? Or has there been some endogenous disenchanting influence on expertise in general in the twentieth century? In the realm of international law, Kennedy suggests that following nearly “a century of unsatisfactory answers to foundational questions [,]” international lawyers became “eclectic” and “jaded” borrowers in the twentieth century (221). Instead of adhering to some foundational theory, they began to use whatever suited their rhetorical purpose. To be a good international lawyer was to be competent across a spectrum of theories and to be able to argue each in turn. Kennedy never lays out this process in historical detail (nor was that his aim), but he suggests that innovation and adaptation in Europe’s encounters with Asia, Africa, and Latin America did much to expand the range of arguments available to international lawyers. So, we are left with the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the era of disenchantment of international law. But, again, I was left wondering: Were nineteenth century international lawyers really less eclectic and ecumenical? Were eighteenth century lawyers? Was Emer de Vattel? Was Hugo Grotius? Were the Law officers of the Crown? When Vattel drew upon biblical, classical, and contemporary examples to argue for one principle over another, was he not treating international law like Kennedy’s modern experts? If Kennedy does not see disenchantment as field specific, but as a more generalized phenomenon, one might wonder whether professional disenchantment and narratives of secularization might go hand-and-hand. As practitioners stopped seeing the hand of the divine in law, did ecumenicalism without damnation become possible? Is this but another in a line of stories about the disenchantment of the world more generally? About the end of history? After all, as Kennedy himself observed, modern experts are “ethically confident and practically disenchanted” in a way “reminiscent of the sensibilities for accommodating both belief and doubt” within the Protestant tradition (12-13). The subtitle of Kennedy’s book declares Kennedy’s primary concern with “How Power, Law and Expertise Shape Global Political Economy.” As such, Kennedy’s focus is on the expertise marshaled in the realm of global governance. Human rights activists, international lawyers, and developmental economists populate his examples. Yet, his theory is never explicitly qualified to apply only to the social sciences (broadly conceived). Are the natural and physical sciences subject to the same analysis? My inclination would be to say yes, but I would like to have seen Kennedy delve, at least in passing, into that question and his answer’s implications. He mentions several times the role that expertise plays in modern environmental catastrophe, but he never discusses the interaction of expertise from the realm of environmental science and whether he would consider that field to be subject to the same process of disenchantment, especially with the degree to which it has been mobilized in contemporary political discourse. In his analysis of legal scholarship, Roberto Unger asserted that “having failed to persuade themselves of all but the most equivocal versions of [their] inherited creed, [legal academics] nevertheless clung to its implications ... History they degraded into the retrospective rationalization of events. Philosophy they abased into an inexhaustible compendium of excuses for the truncation of legal analysis. The social sciences they perverted into the sources of argumentative ploys with which to give arbitrary though stylized policy discussions the blessing of specious authority.”[3] This is in line with Kennedy’s argument. Perhaps Kennedy would have dispensed with the harsh verbiage and substituted, “degraded,” “abased,” and “perverted” with “disenchanted.” But the idea seems similar. After all, disenchantment and equivocation are the markers of a robust and useful expertise in Kennedy’s telling. The difference, as Kennedy says, comes down to faith. The experts, in Kennedy’s telling, still have faith in the larger products of their discipline. Some final notes: I am a historian and have a historian’s bias for stories and concrete illustration over thick theoretical description. A World of Struggle was certainly thin on the former. The final chapter on legal expertise in war was as close as Kennedy got to a vibrant illustration of his theory at play in the modern world. As with any thick theory, close reading was required to uncover and understand the subtle processes at the heart of Kennedy’s book and how everything fit together. The dozens of flow charts, like the experts they described, sometimes occluded as much as they illuminated. But they did provide an air of seriousness. With these minor stylistic criticisms in mind, the book is certainly worth a small bit of struggle. Kennedy’s work seems to call for experts to replace their faith in the ends of their fields with faith in something else; maybe a new ethical sensibility. A good book, like the ‘sophisticated’ fields Kennedy describes, leaves its readers with many more questions than answers. And a great book creates new gaps for a generation of scholars to fill. Kennedy has certainly created a new gap. A World of Struggle is a robust, ambiguous, and compelling theoretical foundation upon which a generation of scholarship in politics, economics, history, and sociology will undoubtedly be built. To what end that scholarship will then be mobilized in Kennedy’s world of struggle, nobody can say.

Review by Tanisha M. Fazal, University of Minnesota Who runs the world? According to David Kennedy, experts, including international lawyers, do. They make the rules we live by, secure a place for themselves in implementing those rules, and reproduce themselves by training future experts. In this sense, the world might appear to have attained a Weberian rational-legal apex of bureaucracy. But Kennedy cautions that all is not right with this world wrought by experts. For, however well-intentioned they might appear—even to themselves—this world politics of expertise has reinforced existing inequalities in way that may be impossible to undo. The focus on the distributive consequences of a world built on expertise lies at the heart of Kennedy’s argument, and is also central to this book’s self-identification as a work of critical legal theory. In important ways, Kennedy’s most important audience may be fellow international lawyers, legal scholars, and their students. He implores them to “lay down the burdens of faith [in law as an inherent force for good] and see law’s role in the ubiquitous struggles of global political and economic life and the injustice that results” (254). A first reading of the early chapters of this book could put one in mind of some recent scholarship that evokes an international version of Weber’s bureaucratic-rational state. Tana Johnson, for example, has shown how international bureaucrats are able to generate and insulate new intergovernmental organizations.[4] Charli Carpenter demonstrates the agenda-setting power of nongovernmental organizations central to various humanitarian networks.[5] But as it turns out, the role of experts today is more contested than at the time of Kennedy’s writing (on this point, see recent work by Tom Nichols and Daniel Drezner).[6] What is more, the book ultimately depends less on the discussion of expertise than on the exposition of inequality in Chapters Six and Seven. Kennedy hits his stride particularly clearly in Chapter Seven, when he invokes the following metaphor: Rather than seeing the hand of power in the glove of law, mainstream international lawyers focus on the glove. They see law acting everywhere in the world and celebrate the ability of civil society organizations, individuals, or national judges to participate in global rule making. Where the outcomes are not desirable or when bad things happen in the name of law, they prefer to see the misrule of power dressing itself in legal justification (240). To be clear, Kennedy is not making a realist argument grounded in international relations theory. He does not appear to view international law as a convenient fiction or a fig leaf behind which national interests are poorly hidden. Instead, the power he writes of is to create the invisible scaffolding of an international system that depends heavily on experts such as economists and international lawyers, and allows those at the top of the expertise food chain to settle into an unequal status quo. One question that arises from Kennedy’s analysis is: how much of this work is specific to the international sphere? Could one not make a similar argument about the role of expertise in inducing and then reinforcing domestic inequality? Certainly, this kind of claim (or a version thereof) is made frequently in the U.S. context today. Another, more pertinent question that Kennedy hints at throughout the book refers to the elusive nature of the ‘international community.’ What is the international community? Who is in and who is out? Who decides? Kennedy’s answer, appears to be that experts from the advanced industrial democracies constitute the international community in two senses. First, they design it, consciously or unconsciously. And second, they populate it. Chapter Eight’s discussion of the laws of war as written to protect the rights of sovereign states is particularly revealing of this dynamic. Kennedy is correct that the distributive consequences of international law are underappreciated. Some of the most effective parts of the book are when he draws on his own experiences as a participant-observer/field researcher to illustrate the inequality perpetuated by expertise on the global stage. Explicitly bringing more of this research into the book would likely have sharpened its prose. While the general argument of the book could have been made more efficiently, he deserves great credit for developing it. Kennedy’s general frustration with his own field leads one to wonder what could be next for the disenchanted international lawyer.

Review by Umut Özsu, Carleton University David Kennedy’s A World of Struggle is erudite, sophisticated, and exceedingly well-written. It is also elusive, imprecise, and politically uncommitted. At root, A World of Struggle’s central aim is to develop and demonstrate the usefulness of a performative theory of legal expertise—a theory of the way in which those possessed of technical knowledge articulate claims and arguments in an effort to win debates, serve clients, jockey for position, and secure recognition for themselves and the interests they represent. Kennedy’s scholarship has long been suffused by a fascination with what he has termed ‘people with projects.’ He deploys the same expression here, prioritizing it on account of its comparatively meagre conceptual and normative baggage. Rather than speaking of class and nation, labour and capital, state and corporation, concepts he dismisses as “labels” and “abstract things” (56), Kennedy trains his lens on what he regards as a more concrete and immediately accessible phenomenon: actors maneuvering to realize specific objectives and leveraging their knowledge to that end, typically in the background of the decision-makers by whom they are employed or with whom they are associated. For Kennedy, the explanatory purchase of this practice-oriented approach—a kind of phenomenology of expert strategies and tactics in legal argumentation—derives mainly from its capacity to illuminate the constitutive power of law. “Although the significance of legal arrangements that shift power among groups is widely understood,” he writes, “the responsibility of those arrangements for economic and political outcomes is routinely overlooked” (196). A World of Struggle is intended to rectify this state of affairs. Many may wonder why exactly a focus on ‘people with projects’ should be expected to yield a more nuanced and accurate understanding of law’s constitutive power. Kennedy’s response is commendably straightforward. Much of the way that we understand the world, he contends, is premised upon the validity of one or another “imaginary architecture” (103). East and West, North and South, centre and periphery, public and private, rich and poor—all such binaries are designed to order an inherently disorderly world, and all are at bottom a matter of social construction through expertise. What is more, a key force behind this work of social construction is legal discourse. To analyze the work of ‘people with projects’ is thus in great part to elucidate the ways in which differently situated experts use the discursive instruments of law—rules and principles, norms and standards, treaties and customs, and so on—to create a world that is legible in terms of such binaries. In this regard, Kennedy finds it helpful to imagine “people coming to struggle with little backpacks of legal and other entitlements, powers, and vulnerabilities” (67). Only by understanding the processes whereby expert actors (‘people’) bring their technical knowledge (the contents of their ‘backpacks’) to bear on the elaboration of specific claims and arguments does he believe it possible to acquire an understanding of the degree to which legal rhetoric—a complex, ubiquitous, and rapidly changing “medium of struggle” (120)—produces and transforms the world we inhabit. Law is a “force multiplier,” a means of reinforcing, formalizing, and legitimating political and economic positions (see, for example, 59, 72, 173). In “doing their best to manage the problems before them,” the practitioners of this alchemical art also engage in something considerably more consequential: “world making” (31). A great deal may be said about such a stance. Here, though, I would like to focus on Kennedy’s basic method and its political implications. Kennedy relies upon an analytical toolbox consisting mainly of structuralist and post-structuralist techniques that have been integrated into legal theory over the course of the past several decades, largely on account of debates within the U.S. critical legal studies movement and its various offshoots. His discussion may roam from David Ricardo to Carl von Clausewitz, but it is nearly always on the basis of a preponderantly Foucauldian mode of critical legal analysis that Kennedy seeks to conceptualize the complex and variegated terrain he charts. Indeed, in many respects, A World of Struggle can be read as a culmination of Kennedy’s decades-long engagement with a form of legal discourse analysis that emerged in the 1970s, consolidated itself in the 1980s, suffered defeat at the hands of legal neo-formalists and exponents of ‘law and economics’ in the 1990s, and has since managed to preserve itself only by accepting a largely marginal fate (at least in law schools and conventional law reviews). In A World of Struggle, the ambiguity and indeterminacy of legal texts are continually underscored, and words like ‘style,’ ‘story,’ ‘posture,’ and ‘imagination’ enjoy pride of place. All this fuels a general theory of “expert performance” that aims to showcase the strengths of a pragmatic approach to law, one in which the discursive is prioritized over the material (122-123). This last point is crucial. The kind of critical legal method that finds expression in A World of Struggle has yielded valuable insights, particularly insofar as it has destabilized hard-and-fast distinctions between law and politics of the sort that are central to conventional legal formalism. That said, it has also displaced—and in some cases actively impeded the growth of—more materialist modes of legal analysis. In line with his social constructivism, Kennedy insists repeatedly upon the primacy of discursive practice. Thus, he stresses that “the exercise of power, even as brute force, occurs within a discursive world of meaning” (8). While he holds it to be true that “the shared imaginary of undisputed facts and common sense sets the terrain for articulation,” it is truer still, he maintains, that “both undisputed facts and common sense are themselves performative assertions that have settled back into knowledge” (137). Even critical and heterodox readers of Karl Marx would find it hard to believe that “[a] ‘theory of value’ is a story people tell to naturalize their interests” (a position that Marx himself was wont to ridicule as a form of idealistic indifference to the primacy of actually existing social relations),[7] but Kennedy appears to think that this follows logically from any attempt to track “the knowledge practices of experts in the making and remaking of actors and structures through struggle” (55, 69). This insistence upon an essentially discursive analytic—an insistence that undergirds and organizes the entire book—is unfortunate. For one thing, it results in a failure to grapple with the material contexts from which epistemic regimes emerge and to which they respond. When all is said and done, Kennedy’s vision is a post-foundationalist one; as he puts it in the book’s opening pages, the realm of international affairs is marked by “expertise all the way down” (4). This is unpersuasive. To suggest that the rules of international trade law or international humanitarian law, say, are produced and reproduced solely through legal claims and arguments, such that we can understand law’s authority simply by examining its use by different actors, is to ascribe an unsustainably great degree of autonomy to legal normativity. It is certainly true that law’s constitutive power has often been overlooked. And Kennedy is to be lauded for his attention to the specifically distributional consequences of that power’s operationalization. But as legions of socio-legal scholars have argued for decades, law and legal reasoning, while distinguished by a certain degree of autonomy, are ultimately rooted in and nourished by extra-legal forces and dynamics. Intriguingly, Kennedy devotes most of a lengthy endnote to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, claiming that it has been influential on A World of Struggle (282, n7). This claim of indebtedness is hard to square with the fact that Bourdieu argued forcefully against the purely ‘internal’ view of law that Kennedy advocates.[8] Only by losing sight of law’s moorings in an extra-legal reality is it possible to deny the significance—and yes, the material power—of class and nation, labour and capital, state and corporation. It should give us pause, at any rate, that very few in what Kennedy calls the world’s “lagging regions” are likely to feel inclined to minimize the extent to which the workings of law are conditioned by the workings of the extra-legal (see, for example, 209, 217).[9] This first problem is related to a second: Kennedy’s focus on the discursive hampers the book’s appreciation of the limits of legal expertise. Take, for example, his discussion of the way in which trade lawyers representing different countries argue about whether a given proposal or initiative is “market-supporting” or “market-distorting” (42-44, 189-195). It is possible (though not obvious) that “there is no persuasive analytic for identifying ‘market failures’ and their remedies or for separating ‘market-supporting’ from ‘market-distorting’ regulations,” and that “arguments developed in these terms can embrace a wide range of choices about just where to draw the line” (153). What is undeniable, though, is that the distinction between ‘market-supporting’ and ‘market-distorting’ is fundamentally unintelligible in the absence of a far more basic commitment to the market economy. And this, of course, is precisely the rub. The ‘game’ one ‘plays’ through immersion in the iterative, interactional give-and-take that concerns Kennedy is capable of sustaining itself only insofar as all participants continue to take for granted its basic ‘rules,’ its “common playbook” (48). In this case, as in so many others, the most important such ‘rule’—all the more powerful for not having to be spoken or written—is that the market, and its constituent logic, reigns supreme.[10] To question that ‘rule’ is to place oneself outside the ‘game,’ to transgress its boundaries and put into question its material basis. It is also to demonstrate that expertise is not characterized by nearly as much “plasticity or malleability” as Kennedy thinks (136). After all, every expert knows that some claims and arguments—indeed, most of the sharpest and most incisive ones—can never be advanced in the language of expertise; such language may not be a “straightjacket” (161), but neither is it a loose-fitting dress. Naturally, all of this has significant and wide-ranging political implications. Kennedy positions himself as a meta-level analyst, a kind of participant observer whose interest lies in rhetorical cartography, the disengaged mapping of this or that field as it has evolved and devolved over time and space. As such, he refuses to stake out a concrete political position. Instead, he simply invites those endowed with legal expertise to embrace their agency. Those who practice the mystical arts of law are encouraged to reflect upon—and to harness—their own ‘world-making’ power by acknowledging their responsibility, resisting the temptation to see themselves as mere cogs in a machine, and perhaps even confronting the possibility of a new form of politics: “rule by people deciding responsibly in a moment of unknowing” (166). But to what end are they to exercise such power? And for what purpose? In accordance with which cause? In line with which ethical or ideological standards? With a view to reinforcing and amplifying the existing machinery of legal argumentation, nearly always coupled tightly with the imperatives of capitalism, or with a view to subverting and perhaps even doing away with this machinery? To these and related questions Kennedy’s book has remarkably little to offer. He writes at length about ‘justice,’ and of the need to counter ‘inequality,’ but only in a romantic, crypto-theological register, deferring the normative all the better to mystify the factual. Kennedy concludes the book with a brief epilogue, the first sentence of which reads as follows: “As a law professor, I train experts” (277). One cannot help but wonder what kind of a ‘world of struggle’ the book would have depicted—and what kind of critical legal method it would have elaborated—had this sentence instead read “As a law professor, I train enemies of ‘expertise.’”

Any author would be grateful for such careful and engaged reflections on one’s writing. Professors Christopher Casey, Tanisha Fazal and Umut Özsu have each read me as I would wish to be read and I am very grateful indeed. They focus on different themes in the book—in each case themes I was hoping would come through. Casey foregrounds what I identify as a disenchanted and eclectic—and yet faithful—style of expertise characteristic of people I have encountered in the contemporary fields of international law and economic development. Fazal focuses on my attention to distribution and inequality, and to the role of law and expert work in its reproduction. Özsu highlights—and takes issue with—what he terms my “performative theory of expertise” and my prioritization of the “discursive over the material.” As I read the book myself again now, it raises as many questions as it answers—that is also as it should be. Casey, Fazal, and Özsu point to some of the most difficult of these, for which I have less answers than hopes that further research will illuminate them further.

Casey, for example, asks how historically and disciplinarily specific the eclectic disenchantment I find among international lawyers at the turn of this century will turn out to be. I have the same question. I have a sense for the historical development of this sensibility among international lawyers. In a nutshell, the profession started out extremely eclectic and confident, turned across the nineteenth and early twentieth century to a more rigid and narrow sense for its terms and role which seemed to require methodological justification, before developing the capaciously plural and disenchanted sense of itself which I describe in the book—a posture which seems to require a strange kind of unstated faith. The story for development economists is different, although it ends in roughly the same spot. Casey is right to wonder about other disciplines and times. International lawyers in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries? Experts in the natural, as opposed to the social, sciences today? His question is particularly important if, as I suspect, the distribution of this sensibility is associated with the distribution of authority among experts. Were it to turn out, for example, that people in the commanding heights of global political and economic life were more disenchanted, flexible, and pragmatic than those at some remove, it would be good to know. I also wonder whether this set of attitudes, although discovered in each discipline through a unique intellectual and political path, might be broadly characteristic of power in the ‘modern’ world, however we might define that: the post-Weberian, post-Nietzschean world of bureaucracies, managerialism, and all the cultural innovations we associate with new media and early twentieth century Europe. If so, also interesting to know.

Fazal wonders whether my focus on the workings of expertise might be misplaced now that expert rule is so broadly under attack. For that, I guess only time will tell. In the book, I develop some preliminary ideas about the role of ‘outsider’ voices in the working of expertise itself which may be relevant to thinking about the broad popular opposition to elite knowledge and governance which has recently made itself felt in the electoral politics of the North Atlantic. More pressing is Fazal’s query whether my analysis of the distributional role of expertise and of law in particular might not be as applicable to domestic as to international inequality. I suspect she is right and I would welcome further research on just this point. In the tools and techniques of economic development policy, we do find a parallel distributional role played by legal arrangements nationally and internationally. I share Fazal’s hunch that the distributional analytics I develop in Chapter 6 would be relevant for thinking about domestic inequality: indeed, many of the intellectual resources I relied upon in developing that chapter were themselves focused on distribution and inequality within a nation.

Özsu worries that my focus on the performative dimensions of power will displace more politically useful inquiry into the material conditions which shape those performances. He associates the book with a tradition of critical legal work in the United States which he believes has done just that. Here, I think we probably do disagree. I intended the book as a hypothesis and a methodological experiment—would it be useful or informative to push a performative idea all the way through our thinking about global systems and structures and regimes? To resist the allure of explanations which did not have people making claims about the situation at their core: to set to one side the idea that there ‘is’ a situation or structure and to see the significance in human affairs of the claim that this is the way things are—and so something must follow. In other words, could we revisit material explanations, from which I have learned a great deal, in performative terms? I thought it was illuminating, offering hints of possible responsibility, agency, strategy, otherwise not visible: Özsu found it a somewhat alarming distraction. Fair enough.

One point of clarification, however. Özsu asks that we place my example of flexible professional reasoning about the distinction between “market-supporting” and “market-distorting” government activity in the larger context of “the market” being what it’s all about. Rereading this passage, I’m not sure whether Özsu thinks of “the market” as a material condition framing and limiting discursive work interpreting its meaning or as a deeper ideological commitment which might be challenged by people ‘outside’ expert discussion about what supports and what distorts. Perhaps both. For me, the second is the more significant, precisely because people could contest the boundaries and priority of “the market” as a frame. Whether in doing so they would be ‘outside’ expertise or engaging in a different expert activity is open for debate. But Özsu is certainly right that this does happen and, when it does, it can be more significant than reshuffling the details ‘inside.’ It is also true, though, that as soon as one thinks about “the market,” one is confronted with lots of details about its shape and import: it is hard to imagine “the market” acting except through the details of its construction. So perhaps there is always a bit of both: contesting the boundary and contesting the contents.

Whether, as a political matter, people would be more likely to do all this contesting if they thought of ‘the market’ as a material condition or as a discursive performance is an open question. Certainly people have been motivated to try on the basis of both ideas. It is here that Özsu finds me “politically uncommitted” and “disengaged.” Perhaps. This is a book about the ‘how’ of our current arrangements, not the ‘what to do about it.’ I end the book, as Özsu notes, with the observation that I train experts. Özsu wonders if the book would have been different had I understood my work to be training “enemies of expertise.” I’m not sure it would have been. In my experience, experts and their enemies need quite similar training and the animus to be inside or outside lies rather in their own hearts and sense of responsible agency. It has seemed an important political project to encourage just that.