[85] Chapter 3 - The Individual

Summary

The thought that the law, in its essence, is power has its last roots in the conviction that all law can come only from the state as the highest earthly power and the strongest reality that a human being may face. Before it – before the encompassing, compact power with its impersonal mechanism and its destructive factuality – any appeal to another instance, any critique, appears to be a futile raisonnement.^cviii In view of the [state’s] enormous achievement of having embanked and rendered harmless, at least externally, a sea of unbridled and narrow-minded egoism and of the rawest instincts, and having forced even the influential evildoer at least to [engage in] hypocrisy, any critique might perhaps even be held, by some, to amount to an unjust and frivolous doctrinarianism.