Conceptualizing Politics

Rechtsstaat in German, état de droit in French, stato di diritto in Italian, estado de derecho 
in Castilian. These terms used to indicate the conformity of the actions performed 
by the state to the existing legislation, whatever its origin or moral justification: a 
paramount example of legal positivism. Interpretations of both the rule of law and 
the Rechtsstaat have obviously varied over time: they have often constituted an anti-
authoritarian barrier, and so they do in our time, but they have also been employed 
against new social legislation allegedly infringing upon civil liberties.
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There is a hidden truth in all of this: laws must be necessarily a general and 
abstract way of regulating social behaviour, otherwise they would lose their univer-
sal character. The law remains open to be twisted in one or the other direction, and 
can never be, by its own force, an insurmountable tool for preventing politically and 
morally infelicitous developments. Legal systems have a logic of their own, and are 
not mere side effects of social processes; but to believe that they can rule or change 
the world by themselves, without interaction with political decisions, cultural and 
ethical orientations and without reckoning with the economic structure, would be 
a case of what was once called ‘Rechtskretinismus/legal idiocy’. In a word, the rule of 
law as an indicator of legitimate statehood or effective democracy cannot be seen 
apart from these surrounding conditions.
A last complex of questions regarding the state and the law can only be briefly 
mentioned here. It must be held that the law governing the life of a state, that is the 
constitution and ordinary law, was not itself born legally, but rather out of political 
acts (war of unification, national liberation war, revolution) that subverted the exist-
ing order through violence.
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 Yet  the  origin is not the whole truth, unlike what phi-
losophers in love with ‘myths of origin’ used to think: once established by a founding 
act, the legal order of the state perpetuates itself by its own force and the citizens’ 

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72  How politics works
support, and remains in its legality unprejudiced by its violent origin (the shoot-outs 
at Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1775 and the Bastille in Paris in 1789, where the 
American and the French Revolutions started; the battles fought by national lib-
eration movements before a successful post-colonial state-building). The same holds 
with respect to another major topic in state theory: even if the path-breaking revo-
lution or liberation war was conducted by a narrow minority, the constituent power
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in the state does not lie with it, but with the generality of citizens as gathered in the 
electorate or represented in a constituent assembly or parliament once they have 
invested themselves in that power by election or referendum. In the same line of 
thought, the excitement shown again in the new century by anti-democratic think-
ers of the right and the left for Carl Schmitt’s (1922) statement (in the first line) 
‘sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception’ sounds necrophile, because 
its root – Schmitt’s enthusiasm for Art. 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which in 
the event of an emergency conferred quasi-dictatorial powers to the president of 
the German Reich – vanished with the Third Reich in 1945.
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 Necrophile also 
because in our era and among democratic polities the problem has ceased to exist: all 
their constitutions provide for the state of emergency by non-dictatorial provisions, 
which do not deprive the liberal-democratic sovereign, the people, of its inalienable 
 centrality – to pick up a notion astutely introduced by Schmitt, the problem has been 
‘neutralised’.
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 Also, at least in Western countries, political change has come about 
since 1945 by elections or mass movements reflected in elections, as in France 1958, 
and no longer by coups or revolutions – except in Greece’s military coup of 1967. 
Positions holding that the (capitalist) state was not just born out of violence, but also 
lives on hidden or open violence, and must be therefore delegitimised and violently 
overthrown, fail to see that a democratic regime, though obviously still containing 
elements of socio-economic oppression and constraints, has realised the political 
order requiring the least amount of institutional violence seen thus far in the polity – 
an order that can be modified and has been often modified on a non-violent way. An 
intuitive worldwide comparison with other regimes of the present or the recent past 
(the ‘real socialism’ of Soviet brand) does not need to be detailed here.