In the nineteenth century, the two dissident streams of thought on war, together with the voluntary-law portion of the mainstream tradition, were woven together to form a grand, if sometimes uneasy, synthesis to which the label ‘positivism’ has been affixed. This achievement marked, in many ways, the logical culmination of trends that had been developing since the seventeenth century. One result was to make the law of war more elaborate and detailed than it had ever been before. In fact, it brought so much order and detail to the subject as to make of war an institution of law, as routine and dispassionately studied as, say, the law of inheritance or trusts or contract. Like them, war was an everyday feature of the social world.