Historical and Natural Right and the Idea of Order as a Problem of Political Philosophy

Abstract

The current discussion of political and legal philosophy hinges on the notion of natural right. No wonder; our age is marked by a shattering of the sense of right almost unparalleled in more recent history. Two world wars and the critical, portentous interval between them have made the political state of emergency into a kind of permanent and normal condition of society and have led to an increase and centralization of state power which appears to make the distinction between the private and the public sphere illusory. The law of political self-preservation caused governments everywhere to disregard and violate their constitutions. The revolt against constitutionality was significantly intensified by the latent condition of civil war which spread and deepened steadily in the period between the wars. It was the necessary consequence of totalitarian and imperialistic ideologies, which aspired to a new hegemony and to a reorganization of peoples and states in Europe and in the whole world through a revolutionary overthrow of the existing order. It was also the consequence of the fact that, in all nations, political parties developed which received directives from abroad and thus were potentially prepared to commit treason in decisive moments. The Second World War, like the French wars against Europe in the age of the great Revolution, was waged ideologically and propagandistically as a civil war. The state’s measures for self-protection necessarily curtail the constitutionally guaranteed rights of the citizens. The modern totalitarian state, which has at its disposal the technical apparatus for influencing men optically and acoustically for its own purposes, makes uncertainty in the realm of law a principle of its action. In order to preserve itself, it would like to do nothing more than to turn men into a formless, malleable mass. The cunning scientific methods for creating terror and the deliberate, medical alteration of personality represent the ultimate extreme of deliverance into the hands of a radical irrationalism which makes all action subject to ‘punishment’ and thus no action ’safe’. These methods serve a planned increase of uncertainty in the realm of law, the purpose of which is to make man a pliant instrument or passive object of arbitrary power.