What Can a Few Make of Mankind?

Abstract

Abstract Harlan Grant Cohen and Timothy Meyer present International Law as Behavior as a collection that aspires to exemplify and set an agenda for an interdisciplinary movement of scholars studying the ‘behavioral roots of international law’. This review essay places the book within a larger context of interactions between behavioural psychology and social sciences. Identifying the origins of contemporary behavioural international law scholarship in behavioural economics, and especially the 1970s work of the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, this essay questions the plausibility of the model of human motivation theorized in International Law as Behavior. Moreover, detailed analysis of the consequences of explaining international law phenomena using behavioural concepts demonstrates that responsibility is systematically under-attributed to the powerful and over-attributed to the vulnerable. Ultimately, this essay contends that viewing legal and social phenomena through behavioural psychology offers little explanatory power, while inuring us to a condition of passivity and control, seeking to replace politics with technique.