Читать книгу Critique of Rights - Christoph Menke - Страница 23

Law rules all: legal regulations are based on the capacity for coercion. Such regulations bear the threat of coercion. The oldest doctrine of law is that the relation to law must remain a relation of “awe” [Ehrfurcht], indeed one of “fear” [Furcht], so that law can be the institution of justice.¹ In the Eumenides, Aeschylus formulates it as the insight that a right which is only established to express the equality of citizens (and which is thus distinguished from personal rule [Herrschaft]) requires subjection to the threatening ruling power that everyone wields over the individual. Athena thus proposes a new system of law for her city since it will closely fuse equality and rule. For “But who that traineth not his heart in fear, be it State or be it man, is like in the future to reverence justice as heretofore? Approve thou not a life ungoverned nor one subjected to a tyrant’s sway.”² Law holds sway [herrscht], it binds its rules to the capacity for coercion, since it reckons with human beings who are not lawful – who do not do, of their own accord, what law must hence prescribe for them. This is true of all law, but in a fundamentally different sense for each of the three legal systems.