Artikel

Negaties van het recht: morele deugdzaamheid en het gemeenschapsideaal als alternatieven voor juridische orde

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Abstract

Negations of law. Moral virtuousness and the ideal of community as alternatives to legal order - The communitarian critique of rights-discourses and law focuses attention on the importance for human beings of ’non-willed’ social commitments and of the value of community. It rejects ’the legal point of view’ as abstract, formal, sophisticated and alienated. In this article the author emphasizes the historical roots of this critique of law and of the search for non-legal social relations. He analyses the social conditions that were supposed for such ’virtuous’ relations to flourish in the works of T. More and Saint Just. For both, society must be less complex and human beings more modest if law is to become superfluous. The ’moral economy’ of the monastery is applied in their work to the whole of society. Besides this moral alternative to legal order, the author also points to a non-moral alternative to law in the works of Sade and Nietzsche. In the last part, the relations between legal and non-legal relations are discussed through the main issues that are at stake in any approach that opposes legality to virtuousness or spontaneity. It is argued that far from being opposed, modern interpretations of legality on the one hand and virtuousness and spontaneity on the other, although apparently contradicting one another, are in fact integrally related.

How to Cite:

Raes, K., (1990) “Negaties van het recht: morele deugdzaamheid en het gemeenschapsideaal als alternatieven voor juridische orde”, Tijdschrift voor Sociale Wetenschappen 35(4), 337–372. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/tvsw.95054