Imagined Consent: Democratic Liberalism in International Legal Theory

The idea of an imaginary social contract has animated liberal thinkers for centuries. From places as mythical and disparate as the state of nature and the original position, humans have been projected into compacts in the name of justice, democracy or 0rder.l In international law too, consent is imagined in order to provide normative justification for the projects of three distinct, yet distinctively, liberal schools. These I call secular or classical2 liberalism (mostly associated with positivism) and, its more recent radical variants, Kantian liberalism and democratic governance. In this article I want to focus on the latter