The world is full of humans. You are one, I am too, even the President. But what concerns all of us? Who is the human in us all? These are the questions. They cry out for clarification, and science keeps its promise: it knows the human very precisely, depending on the different discipline. This time:
Political scientists proceed from the idea that humans would constantly clash in the pursuit of their interests unless they are subordinated under a law-imposing ultimate power – whether in purchasing a car, building a house or going to a concert; a “war of all against all” would break out without a state and chaos would explode without rights and laws, and nobody would stand a chance, thus proving that where interests can act without limitation, they are not effective because they mutually hinder each other.
This paradox is treated by political scientists like an empirical statement: they want to have established the fact that conflicts of interests always and everywhere appear wherever interests are asserted by looking at the world as it exists. Indeed, the most impressive conflicts flourish in this world. Between tenant and landlord, husband and wife, wage laborer and entrepreneur, creditor and debtor, and so forth – but not a single one “without the state.” The material for the political scientists’ concept is a world in which everything exists under state supervision; in which the life’s work of humans subordinated to state power is dedicated to proving themselves in the conditions set by it; in which all interests from property to the family are legally defined; and in which the collisions of interest therefore always have the form that legitimate interests strive for their mutual elimination.
Of all things, political scientists wish to have discovered in this world how the human without a state behaves. They relocate the reason for the conflicts summoned by the state reality so that it is outside this reality – and inside the human. The human, abstracted from the state reality in thought, is however not abstracted from this world: a phantom subject. On the other hand, and in opposition to it, this phantom subject is said to be the reason for all the collisions of rights which are known to political scientists from the state reality, and thus the human gets assigned a characteristic by his political science inventors which reveals that the pre-state political animal is here defined by observance of the state order: without a state the human would offend against everything that the state orders. However, without a state there would be no orders at all! Political scientists need only to start up their bourgeois state fantasy to picture this contradiction: the human in political science is the barbarian become citizen, the enemy of every traffic regulation, the competitive maniac who ignores all the officially set rules of competition, in short: the permanent disturber of every state order, in principle.
For the political scientists, this image of the human seriously justifies that this creature deserves to be restrained. They derive the necessity for state power from the need in human nature to break laws. What makes sense to them here is their own state fanaticism, which does not allow them to look at an asserted interest any differently than from the prosecution’s point of view on violations of the law. What they offer as a derivation of the state from human nature is their point of view that there must be a state so that its own order takes effect. And from this point of view they craft their human image.
This has another decisive snag for them, in particular: with the violent anarchist they present, no state can come about; he is extremely poorly suited for practicing obedience. They themselves notice that their alleged necessity for the state was only of a moral nature, that they have justified the contents according to their impossibility, and from there perform the logically dubious transition to looking for the possibility of the state in the human. Barely have they discovered the wolf in man and sealed, of all things, a need for rule in this beast then they deal with this by allowing their human to sign a “social contract” by which he voluntarily submits under the power of the state.
Now by way of change one may imagine the human as someone who shares the political scientists’ understanding of the necessity for the state. The contradiction makes sense to him that his interest can only be asserted if it is shown to be within bounds, and so he himself is in favor of his restriction. Only: precisely this makes the force of the state, whose necessity the political scientist wants to have discovered, seem fairly superfluous; the road to one’s own success must not be obtained by force. Nevertheless, one must also think back to the big bad wolf – political scientists maintain that the state conforms to the human. They do not explain that he is well suited for a state rule over him that orders his obedience by some beneficial qualities of state power. They construct for themselves, vice versa, the human who corresponds to the state. In doing so, they are very consistent. Out of this comes an idiot to whom every restriction is thought of as his freedom. This does not speak in favor of the state.