SILA ZAKONA PROTIV POLITIČKOG PLURALITETA
THE FORCE OF LAW VERSUS POLITICAL PLURALITY

Summary/Abstract: The thesis that the law is maintained and implemented by force is not a new one. In the social contract theory, due to the fear of violence, people abandon the state of nature and enter a legally ordered society in which they renounce the individual violent rule of law and entrust the sovereign to legally protect them from the unlawful force. In this article, the author presents the ideas on the relationship between law and violence put forward by the representatives of the Critical Theory. They share the view that law is a source of power, authority and, thus, nonfreedom. While for Theodor Adorno law represents a promotion of equivalence and abolition of individuality, for Max Horkheimer it is a means in the hands of authority used for taming the population. According to Hannah Arendt, the human rights concept is unsustainable because it exists and is enforced only within a nation state. Walter Benjamin equates law with myth, arguing that the law is as inevitable for a modern individual as fate was for mythical heroes. What the representatives of the Critical Theory share is the standpoint that the aim of law is neither the regulation of a society, nor the prevention of lawlessness, but rather self-preservation and its own survival.

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