Critique of Rights. Christoph Menke
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 391 (book VII, 1147a).
16 16. Aristotle, Politics, trans. by H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1944), 605 (book VII, 1333a). For more on education via law, see also Nicomachean Ethics, book V, 1130b, and book X, 1180a.
17 17. Jaeger, Paideia, vol. I, 118. According to Aristotle, only law provides the authority required for education: “Now paternal authority has not the power to compel obedience, nor indeed, speaking generally, has the authority of any individual unless he be a king or the like; but law on the other hand is a rule, emanating from a certain wisdom and intelligence, that has compulsory force. Men are hated when they thwart people’s inclinations, even though they do so rightly, whereas law can enjoin virtuous conduct without being invidious” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 635 [book X, 1180a]).
18 18. All members of the family – wife, children, slaves – are thus subject to the male head of the household. “They are not ‘sui juris.’ That does not mean that they are actually unprotected by ethical rules or precepts of Roman religion” (Michel Villey, Le droit roman [Paris: PUF, 1964], 55). These ethical-religious rules are later adopted as law: “But at the present day no persons under our rule may use violence toward their slaves, without a reason recognized by the law, or ever to an extreme extent. [ … ] as it concerns the public good, that no one should misuse his own property” (Justinian, The Institutes of Justinian, trans. by Thomas Collett Sandar [London: Longmans, Green, 1878], 28 [I.8.2]).
19 19. Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, ed. and trans. by James E.G. Zetzel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 111–12 (I.18– 19) [Tr. – translation modified to reflect the German edition that Menke refers to here, which provided the Greek and Latin terms in brackets].
20 20. Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, 134 (II.13).
21 21. Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, 133 (II.11) [Tr. – translation modified to include the Latin in brackets, in keeping with Menke’s German edition].
22 22. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. by André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 40. Without explicitly referring to Cicero, but with clear references to his formulations, Heidegger writes: “In the essential realm of the ‘command’ belongs the Roman ‘law’, ius” (40). Heidegger sees here a feature shared by the Roman and Jewish conception of laws. In contrast, “The gods of the Greeks are not commanding gods but, rather, ones that give signs, that point” (40). This recalls the young Hegel’s thesis that Greek law is being, not something established. For more on this, see Christoph Menke, “Hegel’s Theory of Liberation: Law, Freedom, History, Society,” Symposium, 17.1 (2013), 10–30.
23 23. Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, 111 (I.18).
24 24. Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, 117 (I.33).
25 25. Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, 115 (I.28).
26 26. Aubenque, “La loi selon Aristote,” 149.
27 27. Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, 126 and 134 (I.58 and II.14).
28 28. Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, 127 (I.58). “Reason existed, derived from nature, directing people to good conduct and away from crime; it did not begin to be a law only at that moment when it was written down, but when it came into being; and it came into being at the same time as the divine mind. And therefore that true and original law, suitable for commands and prohibitions, is the right reason of Jupiter, the supreme god” (133 [II.10]).
29 29. Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, 133 (II.11) [Tr. – translation modified].
30 30. Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, 158 (III.3).
31 31. Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, 117 (I.33).
32 32. Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, 72 (I.31).
33 33. Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, 122 (I.49).
34 34. Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, 116 (I.31) (error mentis).
35 35. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil, ed. by Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 144 (ch. 20). Hobbes explains the absoluteness of sovereignty (in ch. 20, cited here) by positively comparing political dominion with “both Paternall and Despoticall dominion” (which, traditionally, had been sharply distinguished from political dominion).
36 36. Hobbes, Leviathan, 144 (ch. 20). Just after this, we find the following: “Because every Subject is by this Institution Author of all the Actions, and Judgements of the Soveraigne Instituted; it follows, that whatsoever he doth, it can be no injury to any of his Subjects; nor ought he to be by any of them accused of Injustice” (Leviathan, 124 [ch. 20]).
37 37. Hobbes, Leviathan, 124 (ch. 18) and 153 (ch. 21).
38 38. The denial of this thought forms the basis for Spinoza’s counter-thesis to Hobbes, that the democratic form of governance is the “most natural.” “In a democracy no one transfers their natural right to another in such a way that they are not thereafter consulted but rather to the majority of the whole society of which they are a part” (Benedict de Spinoza, A Theological-Political Treatise, trans. by Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007], 202 [ch. 17]).
39 39. Hobbes, Leviathan, 151–2 (ch. 21). Cf. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 220–2 (ch. 17). Here too, according to Spinoza, a democracy is better; cf. 200 (ch. 16).
40 40. Hobbes, Leviathan, 151 (ch. 21).
41 41. Hobbes, Leviathan, 91 (ch. 14).
42 42. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 208.
43 43. Hobbes, Leviathan, 324 (ch. 40). Hobbes speaks of “inward thought, and beleef of men” (323): belief is by definition “inward.”
44 44. For the theological foundation of Hobbes’ liberalization of belief see Rainer Forst, Toleration in Conflict: Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 193–6. Koselleck, in contrast, points out that Hobbes is talking not about faith (in a specifically religious sense), but about belief; Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 29 (n. 27) and 165f. At the same time, this implies that Hobbes’ argument for tolerance – which despite all of its limitations has for precisely this reason a fundamental significance – is rooted in the bases for his conception of the state: “Whether I harbor anarchist, revolutionary, or atheistic thoughts is not the state’s concern. That would have been inconceivable to Socrates or Cicero. Sovereignty, positive law and subjective rights are equiprimordial” (Hauke Brunkhorst, Einführung in die Geschichte politischer Ideen [Munich: Fink, 2000], 202).
45 45. Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, trans. by George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Westport: Greenwood, 1996), 57. On the text’s anti-Semitism and Schmitt’s own later self-interpretation, see Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The “Jewish Question,” the Holocaust, and German Legal Theory, trans. by Joel Golb (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 230–40.
46 46. Schmitt, Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, 58.
47 47. Schmitt, Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, 57. In Roman Catholicism and Political Form trans. by G. L. Ulmen, (Westport: Greenwood, 1996), Carl Schmitt takes up Georg Jellinek’s historical explanation of the emergence of human rights from religious freedom or freedom of belief (Georg Jellinek, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens [New York: Henry Holt, 1901], 59–77) and interprets it as a “privatization” of religion that had to end with economic liberalization, 28f.
48 48. “The absolute prince is also the sole representative of the political unity of the people. He alone represents the state. As Hobbes puts it, the state has ‘its unity in the person of a sovereign’; it is ‘united in the person of one sovereign’” (Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, trans. and ed. by Jeffrey Seitzer [Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2008],