Le Juste

In recent years, I have been led to think that the juridical - understood in the guise of the judiciary, with its written laws, its tribunals, its judges, and the pronouncement of the sentence in which the law is said - offered the philosopher the opportunity to reflect on the specificity of law, in its proper place, halfway between morality and politics. To give a dramatic turn to the opposition that I am making here between a political philosophy where the question of law is obscured by the fear of the incoercible presence of evil in history, and a philosophy where law is recognized in its specificity not violent, I propose to say that war is the haunting theme of political philosophy, and peace that of the philosophy of law.