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Abstract
All insulated human groups, asserting themselves through processes of generation and thereby existing each in their proper time (Eigenzeit), partake in a mystery of stability that has been little investigated but without which their continuation could hardly be understood. They generate within themselves a normative architecture that exhibits a sufficiently supra-personal, imposing, and torsion-resistant character to be regarded by its users as valid law, as an apparatus of obligatory principles, and as a coercive normative reality.
Notes
* Translated from the German by Felix Koch. A version of this article was presented as a lecture for the colloquia series What Is Law? at the Cardozo School of Law, New York, April 18, 2005.
1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vermischte Bemerkungen. Eine Auswahl aus dem Nachlaß [Culture and Value. Selections from the Nachlass], Georg Henrik von Wright, ed. (Frankfurt, 1977)
. Note that Wittgenstein’s aphorism alludes to the gnostic-homophilic dream of a society without reproduction, since one can only enter a (religious) order, not be born into it.2. Compare Günther Ortmann, Regel und Ausnahme. Paradoxien Sozialer Ordnung [Rule and Exception. Paradoxes of Social Order] (Frankfurt, 2003)
.3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Morgenröte. Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurteile [Daybreak. Reflections on Moral Prejudices] [1881] (Leipsig, 1930)
, book 9 at 1.4. Gabriel Tarde, Die Gesetze der Nachahmung [The Laws of Imitation] (Frankfurt, 2003), 346
.5. Cicero, De Legibus 1.28.
6. Marc Augé, Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains (Paris, 1999), 103
ff.7. Pierre Legendre, “Ce que nous bien appelons le droit,” in Sur la question dogmatique en Occident (Paris, 1999), 123–52
.8. Ortmann, supra note 2 at 33.
9. See Hans Georg Gadamer, Über die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit [The Enigma of Health] (Frankfurt, 2002)
.10. See Paul Lafargue, Das Recht auf Faulheit [The Right to Laziness] (Berlin, 1999)
.11. Arnold Gehlen, Urmensch und Spätkultu:Philosophische Ergebnisse und Aussagen [Primitive Man and Late Civilization: Philosophical Results and Statements] (Bonn, 1956), 88
ff.12. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Herrlichkeit. Eine theologische Ästhetik [Glory. A Theological Aesthetics] (Einsiedein, 1988)
.13. Richard van Dülmen, Theater des Schreckens. Gerichtspraxis und Strafrituale der frühen Neuzeit [Theatre of Terror. Jurisdiction and Punishment Rituals in Early Modernity] (Munich, 1985)
.14. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)
, book 1 at 19.15. Dieter Thomä, Unter Amerikanern: eine Lebensart wird besichtigt [Among Americans: Having a Look at a Form of Life] (Munich, 2000), 75
.16. See Francis Fukuyama, The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (New York: Free Press, 2000)
, especially part 2, “On the Genealogy of Morality.”17. That this can be literally true is shown by Thomas Jefferson’s well-known sentence regarding the occasional nature of the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776: “Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, not yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.” Quoted from Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1965)
.18. Georg Hegel, Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967)
.19. Compare Michael Ignatieff, The Needs of Strangers (New York: Viking, 1985)
.20. Compare Dieter Claessens, Das Konkrete und das Abstrakte. Soziologische Skizzen zur Anthropologie [The Concrete and the Abstract. Sociological Sketches in Anthropology] (Frankfurt, 1980)
.21. Michel Serres, Der Parasit [The Parasite] (Frankfurt, 1980)
. Before Serres, Gabriel Tarde talked about the parasites of the parasites, Et ainsi de suite: Oeuvres de Gabriel Tarde, vol. 1, Eric Alliez, ed., in Monadologie et sociologie (Paris, 1999), 35 .