Sigmund Engländer

The State and the Law

(1873)

 



Note

A passionate solicitation to put aside the state and its laws in order to enable all individuals and communities to set by themselves norms and standards that are better suited to their own desires and interests.

Source: Sigmund Engländer, The Abolition of the State, Chapter II, 1873.

 


 

The State has only one life and one existence - the law. On whichever side of Liberalism we may stand, so long as we recognise the State in its inherited form, we shall always see in the laws the beginning and the end of human society, the pillars of education, the protection of the weak, the equalisation of social distinctions, and the sanctuary of justice.

Revolutionists have hitherto been distinguished from reactionists only by the fact that the former have sought to pass better laws than the latter, and have taken great pains to make people happy. Otherwise there is no difference between Louis XIV., who made his uncontrolled will equivalent to law, and therefore said, "I am the State," and Montesquieu, Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint Just, etc. What the former arrogated to himself, the latter demanded from the lawgivers. Mankind is to them as dough, which their wisdom would knead; they invent an art to lead men and to make them happy. Montesquieu, who even now is quoted by revolutionists, founded this modern adoration of the laws, these claims on the wisdom of legislators, this beatification and education by laws, and this demand for a mechanical sense of legality.

Laws are everything to him: they are the cows whose teats mankind should suck; and he teaches the legislators what course they are to take with mankind, even as the farmer instructs his pupils how to plough the land. Rousseau also mixes himself up in everything. With a veritable rage for making people happy, he introduces the various plans which legislator should adopt, and how he should wind up the social machine and set it going. He calls the legislator the mechanician who invents the machine. Mankind is for him only the passive multitude which is entirely ruled by the lawgiver, of whom he remarks: "He who undertakes to give institutions to a people must feel within himself a power of being able to change human nature, to transform every individual man, to alter the constitution of mankind, to strengthen them; in one word, he must take from mankind their own power and impart to them a foreign power." And to this despot is attributed an influence on the great popular act of the French Revolution.

All the philosophers of the eighteenth century, all the men of the Convention, expected the salvation of society from individual men who should head society, but who yet knew nothing whatever of the life of the masses. The people stood as a lifeless, silent mass before them: society had come to self-consciousness; it palpitated and voted with vital power, while they studied by what means they should impart life to it. A new age had commenced; the Convention wanted to ape that antiquity, wherein one or two men represented the people.

With the complete vanity of authority, Saint Just said, "The lawgiver commands the future: his business is to wish good; his task to make men as he would have them." The same rage for government gushes through all Robespierre's speeches, which swarm with superficial phrases.

It is really painful to read the speeches of these men, who in their delusion went so far as to believe that they could abolish all the vices of humanity, could they but put mankind in leading strings. The initiative of the people was unknown to all the politicians of the eighteenth century. Every one wanted to carry out his own will, either to improve, carve, experimentalise on, equalise, make happy, or be a guardian to mankind. Each one believed himself to be a revolutionist because he fulsomely lauded the Convention - the Convention which knew not that a people existed; that this people would be free, would mind its own business, and required no guardianship: a Convention which only saw in itself the will and the soul of the nation, placed itself outside society, and cobbled first here and then there, and played the lamentable comedy of Parliamentarism with red caps.

The revolutionary idea of our century is the right of individuals, the negation of government and of the law. Nowadays the law is but the weapon of parties, which each tries to wrest from the other. It only serves the passions; it is the means of dominion and of oppression, the child of injustice and ambition. The law is the last lurking-place of the faith in authority; we desire not to be governed by any one, but we submit to an abstraction - the law. Every arbitrary act of tyranny is tolerated, if only it is done by some twist of a law: and then we consider ourselves free. The law is the fetter which holds the spirit in thrall, and whose bonds must be burst. Once the laws were the expression of universal reason, the public conscience, the justice, the mighty bulwark of mankind against barbarism, the school of humanity. Party passion now has polluted the sanctuary, and the sword of the Goddess of Justice serves the governing classes as a weapon wherewith to frighten, to enslave, and to torture the oppressed. Therefore is it that the people only approve the laws against common crimes and in civil matters, and rejoices whenever an acquitting verdict of the jury withdraws in other cases its prey from the terrible fangs of the law and sets it at liberty. The jury system is destined thoroughly to replace the law. Without laws, there is no government; without government, no State, and without the State there is the free human society, which governs itself in a way, indeed, of which neither any of the previously-existing monarchies or republics, but which other associations, or what has hitherto been called a state in the State, can give an idea. The great political struggle which we now see is the strife of parties for the possession of the weapon — law. The rich will not allow to the necessitous any share in the milking of the laws; and, on the other hand, every poor devil wants to be a lawgiver.

This universal struggle to make the laws is the cause of all the bloodshed which occurs. Every owner of property hopes that he alone will be allowed to make the laws, and every starveling shivering in his garret looks with envy and anger towards the palace of the Legislative Assembly. Thus it is that every revolution commences by the people expelling their lawgivers, by shouting for an extension of the franchise, and by hoping to find in universal suffrage, which until the present forms of society are altered is the chief weapon of the Government, a guarantee for the stability of the revolution.

Every political party has, therefore, only one desire - to obtain possession of the legalising power. On this every Utopist bases his scheme for making mankind happy; every prophet sets up the twelve tables of the law; and French Socialists write no more theories, but issue formulated decrees even as charlatans juggle off receipts for wonderful cures. Every class hopes that when the war is over the law will remain with it. The law is to every party leader the mould into which the raw material is poured and society modelled.

Only a small knot of free ungovernable men desires that in the universal struggle for the post of lawgiver, the law itself may be broken up, and that people may no more be made happy or be governed by Act of Parliament, that the will of neither one man nor of an assembly may be binding, and that with the abolition of written laws authority itself may cease to exist, and mankind awake to self-consciousness and morality. To abrogate laws is far more difficult than to pass them. We belong to the laws. Let us strive to belong to ourselves.

Would that every one were the architect of his own fortune, and that leading-strings, rods, and pap should exist only for children, and not for full-grown nations! Would that every one were responsible only for himself, and that it were impossible for the mistakes or malice of a single man, transformed into a law, to be baneful to a whole society!

The more individuals there are, so much higher stands society; but law abolishes all individualism.

We say with pride: "All are equal before the law," instead of crying out with shame: "The law makes us all equal," since it gives us the equality of all wearing the same livery. Robespierre has lamentably said, "Le bonheur est une idee neuve en Europe."

Yes, mankind does not desire freedom. They struggle against it; they make revolutions to be governed; they invent democratic schemes to give a fashion to fiunkeyism. Because they are too cowardly to stand alone, they have invented the word "nation." Because they shrink from the thought of an unrestrained individual freedom, they become enthusiastic for a sovereignty of the people. There is only one liberty, and that is the sovereignty of each individual. The so-called sovereignty of the people kills individual liberty as much as does divine right, and is as mystical and soull-deadening. Every man is his own lord and lawgiver. The law must not be poured into us, but must come from out of us. Democracy, which will soon be as notorious as aristocracy, has only invented the science of hammering and welding the fetters upon each single individual. Universal suffrage has now no other object than to throw a little mantle of liberty over the general serfdom. A prison does not become a temple of liberty because those words are inscribed above it.

One fights only for the liberties of the people, but not for the liberty of each individual. Abstract word "people," spectre, shadow, thou cheatest each separate individual of his liberty! Mankind, thou robbest the man!

Why should liberty be transformed into the abstract ? Must, then, the despotic State-tie which holds the entirety together in chains of liberty exist? Must I, a single individual, by the foolish abstraction of popular sovereignty be content with things which I regard as false, and which drive me back a century? May it not be allowed for a hundred individuals to band themselves together in unrestrained liberty, while another hundred continue the old system of legal guardianship? Away with the notions of universality (totalità)! we will not be citizens (sudditi). As soon as we adopt this title of democracy, we are once more the subjects of a mocking spectre called popular sovereignty. We will be separate individuals, we will be men, we will be unrestrainedly free.

True love lies in egotism. As separate individuals, we shall centralise our interests and form larger combination, just as we voluntarily form marriage ties. No one shall be dragged before an altar, and there compelled to say Yes. Let us gather round the table, and let each one consume his portion of popular sovereignty. We will all be sovereigns. Let us give up a system which only calls us sovereign on the day when we elect our sovereign and master, on the day when we are allowed to commit suicide. Awake! let us no longer be a manufactory for the production of representatives!

A man can as little transfer sovereignty as he can get another to live for him. We must, by the abolition of the Government, come to live for ourselves. At present all social life is concentrated in the State powers. The separate subjects or citizens are immovable or silent. Their immovability is called order, a congested condition in which all the blood of the State body rushes to the head, and forms the harmony of the State; but when the blood flows into the separate veins, and causes them to palpitate, then it is called anarchy.

Man must be freed from man. Not the will of another, but only the inner voice of my reason, can control me. Hitherto the Government has only been personal; a single individual or an assembly could say, “I am the State." Government must be impersonal, or, what is the same thing, it must disappear. This will be effected by all great States dissolving and composing a collection of small federative States, which will have as little practical government as have now parishes.

As these latter have only administrative but no political officials, and as these administrative officials can in no way assail the personal liberty of individuals, even so at some future time will great States cease to exist, with their armies, officials, ministers, and all the other paraphernalia of government. No State will then be able to have a policy; men will live unruled, impose upon themselves laws in smaller circles, but will not receive general laws from governments or parliaments. In this way the citizens would centralise their interests. Chambers of commerce, which are established by the free elections of commercial men, would thus, for instance, represent trade interests, and these chambers would exercise administrative and judicial functions for the general body. Religious interests, matters relating to public instruction, public works, etc., would, without State intervention, be administered by an understanding of the parishes among themselves, and the other persons interested in them.

But all parliaments, all legislative institutions, all political secretiveness with which the millions of men who compose the State have nothing to do, would cease to exist. Mankind would thus, by its more enlightened formation, return again to the primitive times of the small Greek States. For the smaller the State the greater would be the liberty, and the sooner it would be possible to abolish all government - that is, to transform it into a simple administration, without political significance, and to make it possible for each individual to take part in public affairs.

 


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