Force of Law or Law of Force? The Violent Foundation of the Juridical Order

Abstract

The unresolved tension between law and violence lies at the core of legal and political theory. This essay takes Rudolf von Jhering’s provocative assertion that force can exist without law, but law cannot exist without force, as its starting point to pose a foundational question: is law merely a continuation of violence by other means? Questioning the conceptual distinctions between force, violence, and legality, the work argues that while legal doctrine distinguishing legitimate force from illegitimate violence, in practice, law is inseparable from both. Starting from this hypothesis, the essay follows the interrupted paths of Michel Foucault’s, Walter Benjamin’s, and Sigmund Freud’s reflections and aims to demonstrate that law can never completely neutralize the original violence that legitimates it, on the contrary, it ends up reiterating it in an institutionalized form. But well before, the tragic imaginary of ancient Greece revealed the ambiguous relationship between law and violence, as interconnected features of the same symbolic order.