Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics (2022) XXIV/3

What does it mean to opine in politics? The founder of sociology Auguste Comte answered to this question in such an articulated manner to destabilize our current liberal values about consensus and representation. Indeed, his entire philosophical effort, can be regarded as attempt to redefine relations between liberty of all and scientific specialized knowledge. Through a fight engaged against metaphysical way to overtake theological stage, his positivism carries out a radical critic to the subjective rights’ constitutionalism, deemed unable to preserve both order and progress. Separating powers into a ‘spiritual’ and a ‘material’ one, boosting up our innate altruism, subordinating social solidarity to human continuity, are some of Comtean strategies to inaugurate a new duties’ era, in which the opinion government has the task of translate the ego-alter conflict in a religious dualism between Humanity and Earth.

This paper traces Foucault’s confrontation with modern political science and Hobbes’s model of sovereignty and, in its central part, discusses Foucault’s own position on the theme of war in Hobbes’s thought.

Eugène Sue describes the miserable living conditions in the Parisian slums, where the story - set in 1838 - takes place, and he recognizes how the manual worker is degraded to the condition of beast of burden. The author pleads for a philanthropic intervention to put an end to that aberrant state of affairs clamoring for direct state intervention. Alongside a repressive state apparatus of crime (which thrives among the plebs), he advocates a protectionist juridical apparatus of the weakest by outlining a perspective that will come true in the welfare state, advocating a radical overcoming of the liberal gendarme-state. Sue debunks the myth of equality on which the law of the bourgeois state is based, denounces the social origin of the crime and questions the entire individualistic-liberal structure. A vision of promotion of the law must prevail, where the (positive) sanctions are aimed at the inclusion of the weaker classes, not at their further marginalization, which occurs through punishment.

In this reply I explain the philosophical project behind the book and the reasons for its expansion in occasion of the second edition. I respond to the challenging remarks of my critics and clarify in which terms I adopt a Hegelian approach to a theory of human rights. Hopefully, this should guide the reader through the requested clarifications I provide with regard to functional aspects and possible applications of the theory.