The Rule of the State and Natural Law

Abstract

How should we understand the development of modern politics? According to the main school of German historiography and philosophy — as represented by Ernst Kantorowicz, whose works can serve to summarise a century of German thought — there has been only one way of building modern state power. This way, beginning in medieval times, would eventually mark off the Ancients from the Moderns. In the course of this development, the ancient philosophy of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas would have been totally cast into question, replaced by the philosophy of the Moderns: a metaphysics of the subject would substitute for ontology, displacing the philosophy of Being. Given the catastrophic events that emerged in the twentieth century in western political development — Nazism, the Soviet system — some contemporary thinkers, not the least important Leo Strauss or Hannah Arendt, have advocated a return pure and simple to the Ancients. According to them, modern philosophy, characterised by its Machiavellian defining moment, is purported to have entirely separated politics and ethics, and, on a deeper level, to have rendered obsolete the traditional concept of natural law. Hegel, as a matter a fact, was a precursor on that path, dedicating an entire essay to the critique of natural law as an erroneous abstraction, the working of which is detrimental to an affirmation of the positive living right of the various peoples of the earth.KeywordsCivil SocietySovereign StatePolitical SocietySovereign PowerLegitimate PowerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.