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 kyuzo
Stranger Than Fiction
Registered: 07/05/10
Posts: 981
Last seen: 12 years, 2 months
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 Re: Favorite philosopher?  [Re: RasJeph]
#480030 - 09/20/10 05:11 PM (14 years, 5 months ago) |
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It is the monstrous, yet seemingly unanswerable claim of totalitarian rule that, far from being "lawless", it goes to the sources of authority from which positive laws received their ultimate legitimization, that far from being arbitrary it is more obedient the these supra-human forces than any government ever was before, and that far from wielding it's power in the interests of one man, it is quite prepared to sacrifice everybody's vital immediate interests to the execution of what it assumes to be the law of history or the ;aw of nature. It's defiance of positive laws claims to be a higher form of legitimacy which, since it is inspired by the sources themselves, can do away with petty legality. Totalitarian lawfulness pretends to have found a way to establish the rule of justice on earth-something which the legality of positive law admittedly could never attain. The discrepancy between legality and justice could never be bridged because the standards of right and wrong into which positive law translates it's own source of authority-"natural law" governing the whole universe, or divine law revealed in human history, or custom and traditions expressing the law common to the sentiments of all men-are necessarily general and must be valid for a countless and unpredictable number of cases, so that each concrete individual case with it's unrepeatable set of circumstances somehow escapes us
Totalitarian lawfulness, defying legality and pretending to establish the direct reign of justice on earth, executes the law of history or of nature without translating it into standards of right and wrong for individual behavior. It applies the law directly to mankind without bothering with the behavior of men. The laws of nature or the laws of history, if properly executed, is expected to produce mankind as it's end product; and this expectation lies behind the claim to global rule of all totalitarian governments. Totalitarian policy claims to transform the human species into an active unfailing carrier of a law to which human beings otherwise would only passively and reluctantly be subjugated.
Hannah Arendt; the origins of totalitarianism
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