The wreck of Scholastic casuistry in the mid-seventeenth century left among its detritus the theory of international relations. The survival of this fragment owes something to the distributed nature of international power: There is no overarching legislative or legal power, so individual nations are thrown back on their own casuistical resources to justify their positions. It also owes something to the individual success of the last of the Scholastic theorists and first of the moderns, Grotius.
