© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156920611X573833 Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 195–209 brill.nl/hima Response to Robert Knox Bill Bowring Birkbeck College <Please provide e-mail address> Abstract his response to Robert Knox’s very kind and constructive review 1 of my 2008 book he Degradation of the International Legal Order?: he Rehabilitation of Law and the Possibility of Politics gives me the opportunity not only to answer some of his criticisms, but also, on the basis of my own relections since 2008, to ill in some gaps. Indeed, to revise a number of my arguments. First, I restate my attempt at a materialist account of human rights. Next I explain why, for me, the right of peoples to self-determination is absolutely central to a materialist understanding of human rights; and also ill a serious gap in my own account in the book. his leads me not only to a reply to Robert Knox on the question of ‘indeterminacy’ in international law, but also to a disagreement with him on the use or misuse of the language of self-determination. My fourth section returns to our very diferent evaluations of the signiicance and meaning of the work of Yevgeny Pashukanis, and what, for me, is Pashukanis’s misunderstanding, for reasons consistent with his general theoretical trajectory, of Marx and Lenin on the Irish question. Finally, I present an outline of a re-evaluation of Marx’s principled position on self- determination. Keywords Robert Knox, Bill Bowring, materialism, human rights, international law, self-determination, indeterminacy, Pashukanis, revolutions, anticolonial struggles, Ireland, Africa, Marx, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg My book on international law and human rights appeared in 2008. 2 I have been very fortunate indeed, in that several reviewers have taken it seriously. 3 Robert Knox, who is himself a rising star of international legal theory, has provided a second searching and thoughtful critique which relects a continuing and fruitful engagement between us – the irst was on his Law and Disorder 1. Knox 2010. 2. Bowring 2008a. 3. See also Shaw 2009; Feldman 2008; Harvey 2008. AU1 HIMA 19,2_F8_195-210_Bowring.indd 195 HIMA 19,2_F8_195-210_Bowring.indd 195 4/19/2011 9:28:34 AM 4/19/2011 9:28:34 AM