Between Facts and Norms - Contributions to a ... - Blogs Unpad

90Chapter 3 ·that is, of itself. But Kant did not give an entirely unequivocalanswer to the question of the legitimation of general laws that couldsupposedly ground a system of well-ordered egoism. Even in hisRechtslehre (Metaphysical Elements of justice) , Kant ultimately fails toclarifY the relations among the principles of morality, law (orright), and democracy (if we can call what Kant sees as constitutingthe republican mode of government a principle of democracy). Allthree principles express, each in its own way, the same idea of seljlegislation. This concept of autonomy was Kant's response to Hobbes'sunsuccessful attempt to justify a system of rights on the basis of theparticipants' enlightened self-interest alone, without the aid ofmoral reasons.If one looks back at Hobbes from a Kantian perspective, one canhardly avoid reading him more as a theoretician of a bourgeois ruleof law without democracy than as the apologist of unlimitedabsolutism; according to Hobbes, the sovereign can impart hiscommands only in the language of modern law. The sovereignguarantees an order in internal affairs that assures private personsof equal liberties according to general laws: "For supreme commanderscan confer no more to their civil happiness, than thatbeing preserved from foreign and civil wars, they may quietly enjoythat wealth which they have purchased by their own industry."19For Hobbes, who clearly outfits the status of subjects with privaterights, the problem of legitimation naturally cannot be managedwithin an already established legal order, and hence throughpolitical rights and democratic legislation. This problem must besolved immediately with the constitution of state authority, in asingle blow, as it were; that is, it must be conjured out of existencefor the future. Certainly Hobbes wants to explain why absolutistsociety is justified as an instrumental order from the perspective ofall participants, if only they keep to a strictly purposive-rationalcalculation of their own interests. This was supposed to make itunnecessary to design a rule oflaw, that is, to elaborate regulationsfor a legitimate exercise of political authority. The tension betweenfacticity and validity built into law itself dissolves if legal authorityper se can be portrayed as maintaining an ordered system of egoismthat is favored by all the participants anyhow: what appears asmorally right and legitimate then issues spontaneously from the