Autor: Strauss, Leo

Buch: Natural Right and History

Titel: Natural Right and History

Stichwort: Naturrecht: Ursprung; Konventionalismus: Argument gegen Gerechtigkeit als Gemeinwohl

Kurzinhalt: If the city is conventional, the common good is conventional, and therewith it is proved that right or justice is conventional.

Textausschnitt: 102a Conventionalism avoids this consequence by denying that there is in truth a common good. What is called the "common good" is, in fact, in each case the good, not of the whole, but of a part. The laws which claim to be directed toward the common good claim indeed to be the decision of the city. But the city owes such unity as it possesses, and therewith its being, to its "constitution" or to its regime: the city is always either a democracy or an oligarchy or a monarchy and so on. The difference of regimes has its root in the difference of the parts or sections out of which the city is composed. Therefore, every regime is the rule of a section of the city. Hence the laws are, in fact, the work not of the city but of that section of the city which happens to be in control. It is needless to say that democracy, which claims to be the rule of all, is, in fact, the rule of a part; for democracy is at the most the rule of the majority of all adults who inhabit the territory of the city; but the majority are the poor; and the poor are a section, however numerous, which has an interest distinct from the interests of the other sections. The ruling section is, of course, concerned exclusively with its own interest. But it pretends for an obvious reason that the laws which it lays down with a view to its own interest are good for the city as a whole.1 (Fs)

103a Yet may there not be mixed regimes, i.e., regimes which more or less successfully try to establish a fair balance between the conflicting interests of the essential sections of the city? Or is it not possible that the true interest of one particular section (of the poor or of the gentlemen, for example) coincides with the common interest? Objections of this kind presuppose that the city is a genuine whole or, more precisely, that the city exists by nature. But the city would seem to be a conventional or fictitious unity. For what is natural comes into being and exists without violence. All violence applied to a being makes that being do something which goes against its grain, i.e., against its nature. But the city stands or falls by violence, compulsion, or coercion. There is, then, no essential difference between political rule and the rule of a master over his slaves. But the unnatural character of slavery seems to be obvious: it goes against any man's grain to be made a slave or to be treated as a slave.2 (Fs)

103b Furthermore, the city is a multitude of citizens. A citizen appears to be the offspring, the natural product, of born citizens, of a citizen father and a citizen mother. Yet he is a citizen only if the citizen father and the citizen mother who generated him are lawfully wedded to each other, or rather if his presumed father is the husband of his mother. Otherwise, he is only a "natural" child and not a "legitimate" child. And what a legitimate child is depends not on nature but on law or convention. For the family in general, and the monogamous family in particular, is not a natural group, as even Plato was forced to admit. There is also the fact called "naturalization," by virtue of which a "natural" foreigner is artificially transformed into a "natural" citizen. In a word, who is or who is not a citizen depends on the law, and on the law alone. The difference between citizens and noncitizens is not natural but conventional. Therefore, all citizens are, in fact, "made" and not "born." It is convention that arbitrarily cuts off one segment of the human race and sets it off against the rest. One might think for a moment that the civil society which is truly natural, or the genuine civil society, would coincide with the group that embraces all those, and only those, who speak the same language. But languages are admittedly conventional. Accordingly, the distinction between Greeks and barbarians is merely conventional. It is as arbitrary as the division of all numbers into two groups, one consisting of the number 10,000 and the other consisting of all other numbers. The same applies to the distinction between free men and slaves. This distinction is based on the convention that people taken prisoner in war and not ransomed are to be made slaves; not nature but convention makes slaves, and therewith freemen as distinguished from slaves. To conclude, the city is a multitude of human beings who are united not by nature but solely by convention. They have united or banded together in order to take care of their common interest-over against other human beings who are not by nature distinguished from them: over against foreigners and slaves. Hence what claims to be the common good is, in fact, the interest of a part which claims to be a whole, or a part which forms a unity only by virtue of this claim, this pretense, this convention. If the city is conventional, the common good is conventional, and therewith it is proved that right or justice is conventional.3 (Fs)