Feet on the Clouds, Head against the Ground: Antonio Cassese’s Militant Legal Idealism

Abstract

Abstract This article examines Antonio Cassese’s profound engagement with international law through the lens of intellectual biography. Drawing from unexplored archival materials and early writings, it illuminates the evolution and nuances of Cassese’s international legal thought and practice before his rise to prominence as an architect of post-Cold War international criminal law, including his thinly disguised espousal of natural law thinking; his early defiance of the Italian school’s formalism, matched by an enduring attachment to it; his complicated attitude towards Marxism – a major intellectual force in Italy until the late 1970s – and his brief association with Third-Worldism. This article shows how Cassese’s formation within a school that emphasized the exclusively scientific character of legal scholarship inculcated in him a strong culture of expertise that he sought to exploit politically, reconnecting with a Euro-American reformist or ‘progressive’ tradition for which such expertise was instrumental to the realization of a grand design for world peace and justice.