The enemy of all: piracy and the law of nations

摘要

In The Enemy of All Daniel Heller-Roazen traces a characteristically elegant and rigorous genealogy of the 'pirate' through the Western legal tradition, from classical antiquity to contemporary international law. The book takes its departure from a single insight into the history of European law, "namely, that the pirate constitutes the original enemy of the human kind" (page 9). For Heller-Roazen, the pirate, as the "common enemy of the human species", is not a figure of marginal political and philosophical importance but a "crucial contemporary figure" that lies at the threshold of universality, marking the very limits of 'all' (page 11).