Widerstandsrecht und politische Gewalt

Abstract

Abstract At present, we can observe attempts to revitalize a discussion about rights to resist the abuse of political power. Since its best days in late medieval and early modern times, however, the premises of this discussion have changed. The social-structural premise of the topic had been a stratified society which depended upon a certain degree of concentration of resources and power at the top . This type of society required a moral framework for judgments which included the highest strata and even the prince. Modern society, on the other hand, is a functionally differentiated system without concentration of possibilities and responsibilities for the total society. It consists of self-referential subsystems in continuous evolution, conditioned by changes in the external and internal environment of the system. The concept of „potestas“ has lost its former meaning. The law has changed from a hierarchical structure into a circular, self-referential subsystem, serving at the same time as the technical code of political power. Still, resistence, civil disobedience or „symbolic“ law-breaking remains possible, but only as a kind of social movement without the hope and without the ability to replace a „despotic“ regime with a „legitimate“ one . Resistance is nothing but a struggle about the content of specific political decisions, and its „legitimation“ may have unintended effects.