Lorimer’s Private Citizens of the World

In contrast to its notorious legal differentiation of communities into civilized, barbarous and savage, there is no systematic treatment of individuals in James Lorimer’s The Institutes of the Law of Nations (1883). This article pieces together Lorimer’s account of the legal status of individuals in international law and suggests why this account should be of contemporary interest. It identifies three figures of the individual in the Institutes and uses them – Lorimer’s ‘private citizens of the world’ in particular – to dislodge the textbook stories of the individual as an emerging subject of international law. Employed as a lens, private citizens of the world can focus us on the extent to which a variety of otherwise unrelated theories, critiques, proposals and developments restore or refract such attributes, and on the exclusion of certain features and impacts of the individual from today’s public international law.