^* John Boroughs, The Soveraignty of the British Seas proved by Records, History, and the Municipal Laws of this Kingdom 1 (1651) (written 1633). Boroughs concludes his argument by saying that “the king is proprietary Lord of our seas.” Id. at 105.

¹ 1 Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk. I, 1. 433, at 33 (Frank Justus Miller trans., Loeb Classical Library ed., 1984).

² These principles, although proposed here as self-explanatory axioms, are also intended to be derivations at the level of practical theory from the pure theory of international society presented in Philip Allott, Eunomia—New Order for a New World (1990).

³ “In the opinion of some, the regulation of property is the chief point of all [in framing the constitution of a state], that being the question on which all revolutions turn.” Aristotle, Politics, II.7.2, at 72 (Benjamin Jowett trans., Oxford University Press, 1909). “But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.” The Federalist No. 10, at 129, 131 (James Madison) (Benjamin Fletcher Wright ed., 1961).

⁴ Kant has offered the best explanation of the utility of the social contract hypothesis as a device of social theory.

It is in fact merely an idea of reason, which nonetheless has undoubted practical reality; for it can oblige every legislator to frame his laws in such a way that they could have been produced by the united will of a whole nation, and to regard each subject, in so far as he can claim citizenship, as if he had consented within the general will.

On the Common Saying: “This may be true in theory, but it does not apply in practice,” in Kant's Selected Political Writings 61, 79 (Hans Reiss ed., 1970). Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 534–35 (Norman Kemp Smith trans., 1929), on the hypothetical use of reason.

⁵ In the Roman use of the phrase mare nostrum in relation to the Mediterranean Sea, the possessive pronoun may have included some sense of Roman cosmopolitanism, however provincial that may now seem to have been. In the unfortunate use of the phrase by a later Italian government in relation to the same sea, the pronoun was certainly intended to be possessive, even if as a claim rather than as a description of established fact.

⁶ “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right, in The Social Contract and Discourses 163, 165 (G. D. H. Cole trans., rev. ed. 1973).

⁷ “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, in 1 Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Selected Works 15 (Moscow, 1969). Cf. “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” V. I. Lenin, What is to be Done? 25 (Moscow, 1947).

⁸ the storm we long expect

Shall whirl the vessels round upon their route,

Setting the fleet to sail a course direct;

And from the blossom shall come forth true fruit.

Dante, The Divine Comedy: Paradise, Canto XXVII, 11. 145–48, at 295 (Dorothy L. Sayers Sc Barbara Reynolds trans., Harmondsworth 1962).

⁹ It is more than sociologically interesting that some of the delegations to the Third UN Law of the Sea Conference, most notably that of the United States, were unusually diverse in their composition, including representatives of nongovernmental interests and specialists of various kinds. There was even evidence of fractional interaction among delegations, a sort of communion of specialist interests and expertise.

¹⁰ This point is developed further in Philip Allott, Power Sharing in the Law of the Sea, 77 AJIL 1 (1983).