Autor: Sokolowski, Robert

Buch: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Titel: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Stichwort: Person und Politik, Unterschied 3 (moderner Staat - Republik); Verhältnis d. Staates zu anderen Institutionen u. vorpolitischen Gemeinschaften (Familie usw); Rousseau: Veränderung d. menschlichen Natur

Kurzinhalt: Rousseau .... : "The man who makes bold to undertake the founding of a people should feel within himself the capacity to—if I may put it so—change human nature: to transform each individual ... into a part of a larger whole ...

Textausschnitt: 194c We have contrasted the republic and the modern state in regard to the issue of truth and in regard to the issue of historical inevitability. The third contrast I wish to draw between the republic and the modern state concerns the relationship each of these forms of rule has toward other social authorities and other communities, such as the family, the Church, private associations, unions, businesses, educational institutions, and the like. The republic presupposes prepolitical societies. It does not claim to fabricate men or to make men human. It assumes that families and neighborhoods, churches and private associations, can all do their irreplaceable work in forming human beings, and it facilitates and crowns their work by its own, by establishing the city under laws, the city that both presupposes such prepolitical societies and brings them to their own perfection. This assumption of prepolitical societies is expressed in Aristotle's Politics by the fact that the household is treated in book I as a presupposition of political life, and in that book Aristotle says, "For the political art does not make men."1 The city makes citizens, but it does not make human beings. (Fs) (notabene)

195a The sovereign state, in contrast, the Leviathan, levels all prepolitical communities and authorities. It makes a clean sweep. The only private societies that it tolerates are those that it permits to exist for its own purposes. Instead of assuming prepolitical societies and bringing them to a higher perfection, the modern state is related to individuals, which it takes out of the state of nature and transforms into a human condition. This change is vividly expressed by Rousseau, who in On The Social Contract, describes the legislator or the founder as follows: "The man who makes bold to undertake the founding of a people should feel within himself the capacity to—if I may put it so—change human nature: to transform each individual ... into a part of a larger whole, from which he in a sense draws his life and being.... "2 We have seen attempts in twentieth-century regimes to displace and replace the family itself, as well as neighborhoods, educational institutions, and charitable entities such as hospitals, by massive governmental bureaucracies and mobilizations. The homo sovieticus was only the most extreme form of this titanic totalitarian effort, and we can see what it did to people who lived under it and were its targets. Human cloning and the artificial conception of human life may be a Western scientific version of the same thing. But a coherent society is not possible in a Hobbesian state, because such a state is not in keeping with the nature of man. (Fs) (notabene)