This chapter is a study in the critical deconstruction of one of the most popular theoretical paradigms in modern international law and its basic ideological impact on international law as a discipline. The paradigm in question is voluntarist positivism, and the general thrust of its ideological impact on the discipline of international law, I am going to argue, has been to encourage within it the rise and spread of what one might call a theoretical culture of bad faith – a mix of false consciousness, self-censorship, and a “crooked attitude towards truth and knowledge”– particularly, in what concerns international law’s relationship with natural law and Christian theology.

The last two sentences use a lot of notoriously ambivalent concepts. For the prevention of doubt, let me explain briefly how I understand them in these pages.

This final chapter not only compares the different approaches in terms of conceptual strategies and theoretical premises but also evaluates their advantages and disadvantages. In particular, it shows that the German tradition provides the most general account of recognition but also lacks the critical observations made by the two other accounts. In the French tradition the emphasis on the potential for domination helps to overcome the “power-blindness” of the German notion of "recognition”; in the British tradition the emphasis on the importance of education and socialization helps to overcome the “educational blindness” of the German tradition. In this spirit the final chapter offers a systematic integration of all three notions of “recognition” that were reconstructed in the earlier chapters.