No More Learning

[. . . ] one cannot force an anarchist to recognize that the facts that from the point of view of the state law are interpreted as right constitute juridical acts and not acts of force. One can only demonstrate the possibility of under- standing the set of constitutive facts and norms of international law within a unitary system in which all juridical and state orders are contained. The material that is interpreted as law does not constitute a priori 'right', but it rather requires that quality by means of the juridical hypothesis which is useful to interpret it. (1965, 168)
As we have said, Kelsen did not consider that, in order to be true and have some meaning at all, the hypothesis itself needs first to have a meaning and be understandable. Since meaning does not have its origin in empirical data, it can only have its origin in the moral imperative. As Hegel says, right is something sacred by definition; no material or physical data gives raise to the idea of right. This idea is far beyond everything which is empirically verifiable; it is impossible to conceive earnestly the meaning of the word 'duty' without some sort of sacred. Kelsen himself emphatically insists in the fact that it is not sufficient that certain acts or statements emanate from a group or a person called legislator or gubernator to be called law, neither it is enough that they do not contradict constitution, for such a group, or a person, or the constitution itself would be first to be law, something which cannot be empirically corroborated.
Although the superficiality of those who believe that right is an empirical data, has been refuted, I would like to draw the attention of the reader to a point in which this superficiality has proved to be particularly stubborn and even childish: the right or property. On the one hand, the defenders of property wish it to be an empirically verifi- able data in order to affirm that it exists before or independently from
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the State. On the other hand, it is absolutely essential for Marxists that property --or at least possession-- is a physical and material fact, be- cause otherwise the thesis that the relations of production --which are relations of property that Marxists call 'infrastructure'-- determine the ideas of men would not be materialist.
Jurists have written thousands on volumes about how constitutive property is. Savingy and von Ihering have devoted a lot of their efforts to this issue. However, we are not going to quote any of them in order to solve substantively the question.
The fact that I am the owner of this typewriter machine is evidently not a physical nor a material fact; it does not consist on whether I can hold it in my hands or not, nor the fact that it is within my house, nor that it is in the surroundings of my body since I can lend it for many years to a friend, or leave it in a workshop in order to be repaired, and despite of that, I would still be its owner. Property is ideas. Property consists in that I have the right to determine what should be done with the object; in other words, the others have the obligation of not hindering me from doing with the object whatever I please.
But not even possession is a physical data. As a landowner of a field, I can be the possessor and yet not the owner; perhaps I live many miles away from it, while the other landowner has more physical contact with the field than myself. The same goes for the workers that plow my land. Despite of that, I am still the owner of that field. Any person who walks by it has the same physical possibility as myself to work in that piece of land, or even of destroying it by placing chemical substances in the ground. This makes it clear that possession is also ideas. It consists in the right of using the object in the ways its owner commands.
Despite the intention and the wish of Marxists, the constitutive the- sis of Marxism does not have the slightest trace of materialism --and by the way, it is a false thesis, but we will not deal with that here--. The relations of property are the only decisive element in the mode of production: again, we are dealing with ideas, not with facts. To sustain that ideas are determined by ideas is a triviality that does not deserve our attention.
Let us address now another difference that treatise writers believe to have found between morals and right: the coercion of the latter. The principal difference, namely, that right pertains to the exterior and morals to the interior, has been refuted. They intend now to tell us that right is essentially coercive, that means to say, it recourses to coercion
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in order that people respect its precepts, while morals does not have that characteristic. Therefore, they affirm, there is a true distinction be- tween morals and right.
But this argument is completely thwarted. On the one hand, there are many norms that these very treatise writers would call merely moral and yet they are accompanied by a social sanction whenever they are not respected. On the other hand, there are not only many juridical precepts that necessarily remain without a sanction: the coerciveness of right is sometimes reduced to the moral permissibility of the use of coercive force.
Anyone who reflects a little knows that the liar is sanctioned with the collective rejection of everything he says and even with the con- tempt of his very person; the cruel person is sanctioned with isolation and with displays of horror that end up being a boycott against him; the deceitful person is excluded from taking part in businesses. The list is practically endless.
Those people --who, in view of the immorality that prevails nowa- days, do not regard highly the effectiveness of these sanctions-- take no notice of two important things. First, they are imagining that the legal and juridical sanctions have an extreme effectiveness, disdaining thereby, the opinion of many sociologists who think that most of the crimes remain unpunished. Second, they do not realize that saying 'moral precepts do not have any corresponding sanction' is a uni- versal negative proposition, which only needs a particular case that proves the contrary to be refuted. With the examples we have men- tioned we do not need to enlist all the sanctions that go along with all moral precepts.
But whoever considers things carefully will realize that, in fact, the 'social order' prevails not only due to the sanctions contained in the penal code, but to a much greater extent due to the sanctions that are not contained in it.
And this goes not only for underdeveloped nations. One would only need to look at works such as The Disputing Process (Law in Ten Societies) (1978) written by Laura Nader and Harry Todd Jr. , and the investigation of S. F. Moore called Law as Process (1978) to realize this. Not to mention the works of Sugarman, Fitzpatrick, Pospisil, etcetera.
In this context it would be useful to take a look of this issue from an anthropological point of view. Let us quote that Ino Rossi makes of Radcliffe-Brown findings:
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Radcliffe-Brown points out that in many primitive societies there are no courts or judges, nor any formally organized, central political authority, --but nevertheless people possess a sense of wrong-doing and the notion of public and private delicts. Whenever there is no political authority to apply organized sanctions (law), there are private groups and associations that apply organized sanctions. Moreover, there exist a series of unorganized mechanisms like ostracism, house-burning, blood feud, accusation of witch- craft and sorcery, and ritual sanctions which although not enforced by official authorities, are effective means of social control. (Rossi et al. , eds. , 1977, 348)
As for the developed countries, Nader and Todd refer to the investi- gations of Macauley and Sutherland, in which they describe: "avoiding the law as a means to form and maintain good business relationships; businessmen prefer not to use contracts, and even prefer not recurring to the law in the cases of criminal business activity" (1978, 17).
Let us only think about this: to lose one's prestige in the business world, the avoidance of any kind of deal with the transgressor, the rejection of providing him with credit and resources, are for a business- man sanctions which are infinitely more harmful than those prescribed by the law. The bills of exchange and promissory notes were in the 16th and 17th centuries a matter of honor and prestige for the traders. And even nowadays, the capitalist national systems would collapse without the trust in verbal agreements. It is obvious that even in our times the relations between capitalists cannot be based on the legal or juridical system: a juridical process is long and one can appeal its results, and at the end of that course of action my business would be surely broken or I would have certainly lost the possibility of doing the business move I had in mind. The only trust I can have in those scenarios it that which the verbal agreements can provide me: my own word.
Besides, in the little towns and in the neighborhoods strongly bound that we find in the big cities, the sanctions that are not legal can make life impossible for everyone: the mailman, the plumber, the gardener, the carpenter can all cooperate to impose me a sanction by not pro- viding me some elemental services. It is impossible that the positives argue that the legislator 'implicitly' approves and assumes the social sanctions, for many of them contradict the law itself.
The facts refute the thesis according to which the moral law does not have sanctions. We will later relate this fact with another idea. But now, let us concentrate on the second part: the one that affirms that law is essentially coercive.
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To begin with, we have international law: a law which that does not have a coercive character like many treatise writers affirm. Against a powerful nation that transgresses the international juridical norms there is no sanction, or at least, not a sanction that is different from those which are characteristic of moral norms. A superpower can be more powerful than the United Nations and the Permanent Court of Inter- national Justice.
And let us not forget this crucial point: there can be a criminal in each country stronger or more astute than the several governmental organizations and who remains hence unpunished. The robberies and aggressions that happen all day long are an evident proof of this; the most elemental realism tells us that many of these crimes remain with impunity. Therefore, in what does the coerciveness of law consist? Would one say that it consists in the fact that the law affirms that those crimes deserve a punishment? That is something which morality tells us as well, and the result that follows thereof that there is no difference between moral and right.
The right of self-defense, which is explicitly recognized by the ma- jority of legislations, cannot mean the real available force. The victim has this right in spite of the fact that his aggressor has stripped him of the possibility of defending himself. In this case we have a right without having effective coerciveness at all. The theorist that denies the victim this right by the circumstance itself that he is being attacked in a highly effective way, what he is doing in fact is admitting that force, far from being inherent to right, suppresses it. On the contrary, if the theorist affirms that in this case the right of self-defense subsists, he recognizes thereby that right is not essentially coercive, and conse- quently, it does not distinguishes itself from morals. As a matter of fact, the right of legitimate self-defense, which is acknowledged by every treatise writer, consists exclusively in the power of the victim to use violence in a morally licit way.
The thesis that we have been criticizing could not reply that the afore- mentioned authorization depends on that the positive law authorizes the victim to use violence, for that very positive law would not be coer- cive. Again, morals and right cannot be considered as separate things.
Aside from legitimate defense, there are at least two cases in which the right necessarily lacks coactivity.
The crime of not denouncing a criminal has to remain unpunished, because otherwise we would be in a processus in indefinitum. In the first
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link of the chain, the penal code speaks of penalties, but, what about the crime of not denouncing someone who commits the crime of not denouncing? This crime has to remain without a sanction, because otherwise one would have to sanction he who does not denounce the people who has not denounced, etcetera.
Necessarily, the crime of not denouncing someone who does not give away a delinquent must remain unpunished. One should notice that in the real existing codes there are many laws which forget to determine the penalty to the crime they prohibit, but the defenders of the thesis we have been criticizing would respond grandiloquently that these laws are not right and period. The argument we have been discussing, however, does have nothing to do with that. It is not about crimes which have remained unpunished by accident, but of a crime which, due to the very logic of things, will necessarily remain without a sanction. Consequently, it is false that right is essentially coercive.
As the thesis we have been refuting is a universal affirmative state- ment, one only needs to demonstrate that it is completely false. There is another example we can bring up in order to reinforce our point: the juridical order cannot determine a sanction in case in which the head of state commits a crime and resists the sanctions prescribed by law. The juridical order would have to create another instance which is authorized to employ more force than the one it originally granted to that head of state. That scenario, however, could repeat itself again in an endless process.
The result of the above is that the juridical order necessarily contains some precepts without a sanction. If it grandiloquently responds that those precepts are not right but morals, the very same thesis they are defending falls apart, because it would turn out that the juridical order necessarily contains some moral precepts and hence is false that right is different than morals.
This convergence and identification between right and morals has been our very subject: the Hegelian ethicity which is the truth of both right and morals: "Neither the juridical nor morals can exist by their own, they both need to have the ethical as carrier and fundament [. . . ] right only exists as a branch of a whole, as the plant that grows in a robust and independent tree" (Rph 141 Z).
"Imagination figures sometimes that the State remains united due to the force, but what sustains it, is the fundamental sense of order that everyone has" (Rph 268 Z).
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Positivists make a mistake of imagination when they do not realize that the actuality of the State is ethics and that there are innumerable ethical duties that one forcefully and logically needs in order that the legislator or a governor can give a command.
Let us think of the duty of not lying, of the duty of taking the man that addresses me as a person and not as a bunch of atoms, of the duty of giving sense --to the extent I can -- to the content by itself chaotic of sounds that the person in front of me emits, of the duty of assuming the intersubjective obliga- tions that every 'verbal action' implies.
Let us stop for a moment in this last point. Both the speaker and the hearer must assume specific duties, which depend on the specific verbal action we are dealing with: promises, advises, regards, threats, etcetera. It is impossible that us humans understand each other if we do not hit the mark with each kind of verbal action that other speakers are trying to carry out, if we do not adopt the corresponding role; for instance, if we do not realize that what the other person is saying is a yoke, we are in fact not understanding anything. But for each kind of verbal action some specific duties follows, without the acceptance of which the verbal action could not have been possible.
If I made a promise, the duties that follow from that are obvious. But the same goes if I gave a piece of advice: I adopt therewith the obliga- tion of not being surprised if the other person behaved in accordance with what I said. If I made a plea, I should not be surprised if one pro- ceeds in the way I suggested. Besides, in that case, I also acquire the obligation of being thankful. If I made a statement, I am obligated to response for the logical consequences of what I said, and I am obliged to concur when somebody says the same thing I did. Every verbal ac- tion constitutes an ethical fact that has consequences: both the agent and the receiver who accept to participate in them assume their con- sequences. For instance, the person who was given an advice has the obligation of not being surprised of the negative outcome if he acted contrarily to what his friend said.
And not only are the duties related to language the ones which constitute the complex that we call society and state. Let us think in the duty of not aggressing each other; in the duty of not making fires; in the duty of producing the goods and services of what I am responsible; in the duty of behaving in a way that I do not hurt anybody; in the duty of prudence and moderation of movements so that my neighbor can live calmly and in peace, etcetera.
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This series of innumerable ethical duties is the condition of possibility to every act of authority, whether it is legislative, executive or judicial. To think that some governor or legislator creates out of nowhere human co- existence is pure lack of reflection. This series of rights and duties is prior to everything: it is the condition of the possibility even of speaking. Such a hypothetical 'founder' cannot be said to adopt and assume legisla- tively all these duties by transforming them into positive right, because they are innumerable: sociologists and anthropologists even nowadays would not be able to make a complete list. In what serious way can one say that the legislator or the judge make positive a series of duties that do not even know of? Evidently, there is no conscious act on the part of the legislator, the judge, or the politician in relation to these duties. The 'implicit' assumption that the positivist theorist would attribute them would be an act of such theorist and not of them, and therefore it would not be positive right but the imaginative lucubration of the theorist.
International law expert Clive Perry, who has defended the juridical character of international law despite its apparent lack of coerciveness, has rightly remarked:
No juridical system depends completely, either for its effectiveness, or for the definition and development of the norm it contains, on the application of imposition by means of a superior power. If men decided not to obey the law within these State, there could never be enough policemen that could force them not to behave like that. Exactly the same kind of recourse with which one counts for the preservation of the apparently high degree of order that prevails within the States of the world, are available to pre- serve the international order as well. Theoretically speaking, they can be employed with no lesser degree of effectiveness in both of these realms (Sorensen ed. , 1978, 55s).
As a whole, the displays of social disapproval are a sanction much more efficient than those foreseen by the law and the application of au- thority. And the same goes for the spontaneous action of the passers-by who try to prevent a homicide or an act of cruelty. The duties attached to the 'verbal actions' have as their sanction the systematic exclusion from the community for those who do not behave well. Hegel says correctly that positive right can only exist as a parasite in another right that is not written and which is called ethicity. No one can deny the character of right to ethicity, because its sanction, taken integrally, is more efficient than that of positive right.
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Let us only insist in the non-written precept that says 'you shall not deceive'. As it is a constitutive element of speech, it is evidently the condition of possibility of any positive precept; and evidently, society also punishes whoever does not respect this by boycotting him once his felony is discovered. Plato energetically rejects (Laws VII 793 BC) the opinion of those who think that these 'not written laws' are in fact laws, for they are, as Plato says, the fundament of the written laws and the bond that ties ones with the others together.
It would be completely paradoxical to believe that the precept 'you shall not deceive' does not exist if some legislator does not establish it. Positivism would have no other way out than saying that the entire community was legislator before some individual or group assumed such functions. In that case, there would be no difference between positivism and no-positivism, for there would be no difference be- tween legislating and not legislating, The antipositivism holds that one does not need legislators or authority in order that right exists. Positivism affirms the contrary, but in order to be a legislator one only needs to be considered by the theory as such. Reality does not need to be different than the way anti positivism describes it; for the correctness of the positivist thesis one needs only the whim of the positivist theorist. In fact, we deal there only with mental toys and nothing more.
4. State
Rousseau's disastrous mistake was to consider man good by nature. But that man is man by nature has been and still is the absolute mistake within vulgar thought, Sociology, Psychology, Politics, Pedagogy, Theology and Philosophy, despite that Plato and Aristotle demonstrated the contrary twenty five centuries ago and in spite of the fact that Hegel deepened that precise demonstration almost two centuries ago.
When Aristotle (Pol I 1253a25) and Hegel (JS 505 et passim) stridently proclaimed that by essence the State anteceded man, several thinkers tore their clothes believing than that priority of the State attempted to tell us what man ought to be. It did not even cross their minds that what man is, is what it is all about, it is a confirmation. In spite of the fact that Hegel takes heed of it since the preface itself: "To understand what man is, such is Philosophy's task. " (Rph xxi fine)
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I already remarked (I, 1) that modern anthropology agrees that Hegel is right: by nature man is not man but animal; the so-called 'human nature', which according to the biased and pedant tyro is 'the same ev- erywhere', is not human but primate.
If only the anthropologists of our century had read Hegel, they would have synthesized their own research in the following phrase: "The fundamental principle is that man as such is not a natural being, he is not an animal. " (PR II, I 27)
This is everything those who scream blue murder must know when they read: "Everything man is, he owes it to the State; only there he has his essence. " (VG 111)
It does not surprise me that such a good scholar like Mure states that Karl Popper's invectives against Hegel are "blatantly ill-informed" (1965 viii), neither what Ripalda claims about them that "it is hard to read something more idiotic. " (FR xiv)
But Karl Marx, an author Ripalda does not take to be idiotic, turns out to be just as incapable as Karl Popper to understand that the State makes the man and not vice versa, even though there is no clearer issue than the fact that by nature man is an animal but not man. It is enough with the next 'critique' (? ) from Marx's pen against Hegel to make clear that the former simply never got what the point was: "I am man be- cause I was engendered without society's arrangement; this particular creature that I am can be transformed into a lord or a king just due to social arrangements. " (MEW 1 310s) What is claimed here is that man becomes man without society's intervention.
We do not find in Marx or in Popper the slightest suspicion that zoo^n politiko? n (Pol I 1253a3) is the definition of man. Both still believe, as every coffee shop philosopher, that in the beginning there was a time in which there was no State or Right, the strictly speaking contradictory time that they called the situation of nature, as if the expression 'natu- ral man' wasn't a contradictio in terminis. Notice that I am not claiming that they believe in a myth, even though such time is indeed a myth; I am saying that they have not understood the difference between man and animal. The same happens to Kelsen by the way; since only posi- tive Right is Right, supposedly before legislating and governing was invented there was a 'natural situation' in which man was not man and there was no Right.
The refutation of this superficiality was formulated in the third chap- ter (III, 7 and III, 9). There, I showed that without self-consciousness
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man is not man and that the rise of self-consciousness is impossible without the social appeal that demands duties and rights. I beg to confer. Whatever Marx says, no one is man by birth without the inter- vention of society.
Besides this fundamental error, Marx makes the mistake of be- lieving that civil society can exist without a State, the mistake of not understanding the Hegelian thesis according to which "civil society [. . . ] supposes the State. " (Rph no. 182 Z) A thesis Aristotle insisted on relentlessly. The Marxian text I quoted offers the advantage of making apparent that Marx's is a core mistake; that Marx denies the interven- tion of society itself in the constitution of man as man. This fundamental mistake discredits the whole Marxian critique of Hegel's State and Le- gal philosophy. And it is important to remark that according to Engels (MEW 16 362s) this critique is the origin of Marxism.
Putting Marx aside, if we are to reject the accusations of statism, it is not to calm down its accusers telling them that there has been a misunderstanding and that in the end Hegel claims the same as them. It is not about an issue of terminology, as if after clarifying that Hegel does not understand by State the same that them, everything would be settled. It is not true that anyone can define State as it pleases him. Studying an author neither consists of verifying if he holds what I already knew.
The priority of State seems to them unbearable because they identify State with government. They overlook that the identity means Legal positivism because they make the existence of individual rights de- pend on the ruler. Only who defends human rights that do not depend on any authority can logically reprove statism.
In every single European country there is a real distinction between the head of State and the head of government, which logically implies a real distinction between State and government. A theory conscious of its duties has to define State in a way that government does not get included in the definition.
No doubt the definition proposed by Hegel was crystal clear since the beginning. For example, in his 1830 review, F. J. Stahl summarizes Hegel's ideas as follows: "According to his ideas, with the concept of Right the concept of State is already given; it is enough to scrutinize the former in order to find the latter. " (In Riedel ed. I 1975, 223)
In Philosophy of Right Hegel defines State since the preface: "the ethical universe" (das sittliche Universum) (Rph xxii), i. e. , the set of the ethical.
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And he said lines above: "The ethical world, the State. " (Rph ix) The same definition is found later in the main part of the book: "The State is by itself and for itself the set of the ethical. " (Rph no. 258 Z)
We have seen what the ethical is for Hegel: the intersubjective rights and duties free of, and contrasted with, a narcissist morality and a positive Right that would make them depend on legislations. The set of the true duties and rights is the State. By the time Hegel gave his legal lectures to the Gymnasium students at Nu? remberg he already held that: "The State is the association of men under legal relationships. " (NH 246) Afterwards, in his Philosophy of History, he held exactly the same: "We call State the spiritual individual, name- ly, the people as structured and transformed in an organic whole. " (VG 114)
The significance of both the government and the monarch are so diminished that the monarchist K. E. Schubarth attacked Hegel's doc- trine in 1839 with the following words:
The prince is not the substance of the State, which is really constituted by the set of the different particular organic spheres such as family and civil society according to its structuring in diverse social estates, corporations and chambers. All this makes the prince's importance completely acciden- tal. (In Riedel ed. I 1975, 254)
Both those that accuse Hegel of statism and those who with huge ease label him the ideologist of the Prussian monarchy should know that Schubarth's work is entitled: On the Irreconcilability of the Hegelian Doctrine of State with the Supreme Principle of Life and Development of the Prussian State.
Schubarth's fears were not groundless. Hegel expressly says:
For being a monarch it is just required a man who says 'yes' and who dots the i's and crosses the t's; since the tip should be such that the particu- larities of character are of no importance. Beyond this last decision, any other property the monarch possesses ought to be reduced to peculiarities anything could properly rely on. It is true that there might be stages in the development in which those peculiarities might stand out, but in that case we would be dealing with a State not fully developed yet, which is not well built. Within a well-ordered monarchy only law is concerned with the objective; what the monarch adds is just the subjective 'I want' (Rph no. 280 Z) (my emphasis).
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