Liberalism has always appreciated the importance of legality. But liberal legality is an abstract legality, concerned with the promotion of a purely philosophical idea of “human rights.” What value are human rights, without the judicial process that will uphold them? And besides, in resting one’s faith in this beguiling abstraction, does one not also give to one’s enemy another bastion against the recognition of his illegitimacy? Is it not possible for him to say that he upholds human rights—only different rights? (The right to work, for instance, or a right to a stake in the means of production.) If one looks back to the French Revolution, one sees just how easy it is for the doctrine of “human rights” to become an instrument of the most appalling tyranny. It suffices to do as the Jacobins did—to abolish the judiciary, and replace it by “people’s courts.” Then anything can be done to anyone, in the name of the Rights of Man.

In response to liberalism, therefore, it is necessary to work for the restoration of the concrete circumstances of justice. But the concrete law that I have been advocating is very unlike anything that either a socialist or a liberal would approve. It preserves inequalities, it confers privileges, it justifies power. That, however, is also its strength. For there always will be inequalities: there always will be privilege and power. Those are nothing but the lineaments of every actual political order. Since inequalities, privileges, and powers exist, it is right that they should coexist with the law that might justify them. Otherwise they exit unjustified, and also uncontrolled.