Critique of Rights. Christoph Menke

Cambridge University Press, 1996), 91.

      9 9. Hobbes, Leviathan, 200.

      10 10. [Tr. – “right” is in English in the original here, equated with ius, and thus the subjective sense of right that is otherwise consistently rendered throughout “a right,” “rights,” “claim,” or “subjective right” and must be distinguished from “law” or “right” as prevalent system of laws, which Menke immediately goes on to do in the very next lines.]

      11 11. Friedrich Carl von Savigny, System of the Modern Roman Law, trans. by William Holloway (Madras: J. Higginbotham, 1867), 6. For the historical background of this terminological suggestion, see Alejandro Guzmán Brito, “Historia de la denominación del derecho-facultad como ‘subjetivo’,” Revista de Estudios Histórico-Juridicos, XXV (2003), 407–33.

      12 12. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 63 [Tr. – translation modified]. In what follows, I am using the term “claim” in a manner different from its juridical usage. I take it to mean a legitimate claim and thus to be coextensive with the capacity to put others under obligations.

      13 13. [Tr. – “law” and “right” are in English in the original here.]

      14 14. [Tr. – “law” and “right” are in English in the original, following Hobbes’ usage. In keeping with Hobbes’ distinction, Gesetz is translated as “law” here and Recht is translated as “right.” I switch back to translating Recht as “law,” as noted below, where Menke draws a parallel between Gesetz and Recht in his discussion of Strauss’ interpretation of Hobbes.]

      15 15. Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 156.

      16 16. Strauss, Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 156.

      17 17. In the passage omitted with ellipses we find: “in other words, because Hobbes’s political philosophy, as the harshest critic which that philosophy has recently found … is itself based … on assumptions representing an extreme form of individualism: an individualism more uncompromising than that of Locke himself” (Strauss, Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 157). Strauss here refers to Charles Edwyn Vaughan, Studies in the History of Political Philosophy before and after Rousseau (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1925), 25. For Strauss’ argument, see Leander Scholz, Der Tod der Gemeinschaft: Ein Topos der politischen Philosophie (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012), 32–7.

      18 18. [Tr. – Here and elsewhere Anspruch, which I generally translate as “claim,” is equated by Menke with Recht in the “subjective” sense of “a right.”]

      19 19. Strauss, Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 160.

      20 20. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 181.

      21 21. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 182.

      22 22. [Tr. – I now return to translating Recht as “law,” due to Menke’s parallel here of Recht and, in the Hobbesian context, Gesetz.]

      23 23. “If we may call liberalism that political doctrine which regards as the fundamental political fact the rights, as distinguished from the duties, of man and which identifies the function of the state with the protection or the safeguarding of those rights, we must say that the founder of liberalism was Hobbes” (Strauss, Natural Right and History, 181–2). Hannah Arendt sees the fundamental assumption of the French Revolution, which for this reason can or must be called “liberal” in comparison to the republicanism of the American Revolution, as rooted in the view that “these rights [Tr. – i.e., the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen] indeed were assumed not to indicate the limitations of all lawful government, but on the contrary to be its very foundation” (Arendt, On Revolution [London: Penguin, 1963], 148).

      24 24. [Tr. – “separates … from” and “set apart” are translations of trennt … von and getrennt, respectively, which Menke is repeating for emphasis but which I’ve had to vary in their rendering to avoid awkwardness in English. Readers should here note that Menke intends “set apart” to refer back to “separates” for emphasis.]

      25 25. [Tr. – “law” and “right” are in English in the original. See note 15.]

      26 26. Jeremy Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies, in: Nonsense upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man, ed. by J. Waldron (London: Methuen, 1987), 46–76, here 53.

      27 27. Raymond Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 144.

      28 28. [Tr. – Menke cites two editions of this work by Kelsen at various points throughout. There is an English translation, but it does not contain everything that Menke cites. I have therefore followed Menke in citing both German editions as he does, and on occasion provide the pagination for the English translation, where possible.] Hans Kelsen, Reine Rechtslehre, ed. by Matthias Jestaedt (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 53.

      29 29. Kelsen, Reine Rechtslehre, 57.

      30 30. Benedict de Spinoza, The Complete Works, trans. by Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 685 (ch. 2, § 8 of A Political Treatise).

      31 31. Manfred Walther, “Grundzüge der politischen Philosophie Spinozas,” in: Michael Hampe and Robert Schnepf (eds.), Baruch de Spinoza: Ethik (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006), 215–36, here 222.

      32 32. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 45.

      33 33. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 45.

      34 34. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 90. In “Toward Perpetual Peace,” Kant speaks about the fact that “in the state of nature, there can be nothing other than private right” (Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, trans. by David L. Colclasure [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006], 106). The state of nature is thus without right in the sense that no “public right” exists in it, as a legally secured process established by legislation (Toward Perpetual Peace, 109). According to Kant, it is not a state without law, since it would then also be one without private law.

      35 35. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 44.

      36 36. Kelsen, Reine Rechtslehre, 71. Also, see 56–8.

      37 37. For an analysis of rights as elements in legal relationships see Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning (Dartmouth: Ashgate, 2001). Hohfeld shows that rights can be respectively defined in four distinct ways through their opposite and correlative (Fundamental Legal Conceptions, 12ff.).

      38 38. Alexandre Kojève, Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, trans. by Bryan-Paul Frost and Robert Howse (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 40.

      39 39. [Tr. – “right” and “law” are in English in the original here.]

      40 40. Kelsen, Reine Rechtslehre, 58 and 61, respectively. On the problematic of the concept of reflex, see p. 64, as well as note 6, and pp. 125–7 in this volume.

      41 41. [Tr. – “right” and “law” are in English in the original here.]

      42 42. Cf. Rolf Göschner, “Dialogik der Rechtsverhältnisse,” in: Rechtsphilosophie im 21. Jahrhundert, ed. by Winifred Brugger, Ulfrid Neumann, and Stephan Kirste (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008), 90–110, here 93 and 97. Yves Charles Zarka has shown that – in contrast to a reductive critique of subjectivism and atomism in the bourgeois theory of rights – Pufendorf and Leibniz already understood rights in the context of intersubjective legal relationships; see Yves Charles Zarka, “L’invention du sujet de droit,” in: L’autre voie de la subjectivité: Six études sur le sujet et le droit naturel au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Beauchesne, 2000), 3–32. However, at the same time, rights in bourgeois law are authoritative instances of subjectification. For more on this, see part III of this book.

      43 43. Savigny, System of the Modern Roman Law, 18. This does not mean separating them from