[lbo-talk] Strauss 1

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Tue Dec 23 03:18:27 PST 2008


Chuck wrote:

"Strauss takes up Aristotle on these traces and evokes the concept of Public Safety as the necessary arbiter and limiter of natural right. Ah, yes the national security state and its arguments for the limits on rights in times of national emergency, the need to seek out the enemies within, etc. Then Strauss turns the tables, and gives the state the freedom to determine how best protect itself, so that natural right is only free to change under a state power threatened by external or internal enemies. In other words Strauss takes away the changeable nature of natural right from the people and gives it to the state. And Strauss gives to the state the power to invent its own rights, based on the inventiveness and changeable threats from within and without (see, Natural Right and History, p156-84)"

To which I say, thanks, I take back what I said. This is a very useful critique. I am still a bit reluctant to map philosophical results directly onto political positions (even the Nazi Heidegger, whose categories often seem to have a direct correlate in Nazi thinking deserves to have his philosophy understood in its own terms), but this makes the argument very well.

I was talking to a law lecturer I know the other day, and he made the point that the harm principle was behind a lot of liberal theories of right, and that in more recent times right-wingers, too, no longer having confidence in an appeal to a higher moral authority, had adopted the harm principle as the basis of right, too. But, he went on to say, most jurisprudence today thinks that concepts of right based on the harm principle all fall apart.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list