Autor: Strauss, Leo

Buch: Natural Right and History

Titel: Natural Right and History

Stichwort: Hobbes; Naturrecht - Gnade - Regierung; Naturzustand vor jeder sozialen Ordnung;

Kurzinhalt: The individual ... had to be conceived of as essentially complete independently of civil society; Hobbes ... replaced the state of grace by the state of civil society.

Textausschnitt: 183a The tradition which Hobbes opposed had assumed that man cannot reach the perfection of his nature except in and through civil society and, therefore, that civil society is prior to the individual. It was this assumption which led to the view that the primary moral fact is duty and not rights. One could not assert the primacy of natural rights without asserting that the individual is in every respect prior to civil society: all rights of civil society or of the sovereign are derivative from rights which originally belonged to the individual.1 The individual as such, the individual regardless of his qualities--and not merely, as Aristotle had contended, the man who surpasses humanity--had to be conceived of as essentially complete independently of civil society. This conception is implied in the contention that there is a state of nature which antedates civil society. According to Rousseau, "the philosophers who have examined the foundations of civil society have all of them felt the necessity to go back to the state of nature." It is true that the quest for the right social order is inseparable from reflection on the origins of civil society or on the prepolitical life of man. But the identification of the prepolitical life of man with "the state of nature" is a particular view, a view by no means held by "all" political philosophers. The state of nature became an essential topic of political philosophy only with Hobbes, who still almost apologized for employing that term. It is only since Hobbes that the philosophic doctrine of natural law has been essentially a doctrine of the state of nature. Prior to him, the term "state of nature" was at home in Christian theology rather than in political philosophy. The state of nature was distinguished especially from the state of grace, and it was subdivided into the state of pure nature and the state of fallen nature. Hobbes dropped the subdivision and replaced the state of grace by the state of civil society. He thus denied, if not the fact, at any rate the importance of the Fall and accordingly asserted that what is needed for remedying the deficiencies or the "inconveniences" of the state of nature is, not divine grace, but the right kind of human government. This antitheological implication of "the state of nature" can only with difficulty be separated from its intra-philosophic meaning, which is to make intelligible the primacy of rights as distinguished from duties: the state of nature is originally characterized by the fact that in it there are perfect rights but no perfect duties.2 (Fs) (notabene)