THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

Page 546
constructive, so to speak, only through the imagination of pure reason, not through its logic. Classic Natural Right, however, represents at least since Pufendorf one of
the most conscious attempts at applied logic, and from this angle its relation to the social utopias is like that of a strict canon to a song or like that of a drama by Racine
to a vaudeville. And it was the mathematician Leibniz who asserted the following to the lawyer of this period: ‘One can draw firm conclusions from every definition, by
using indisputable logical rules. And one does precisely this in the construction of necessary sciences based on rigorous proof, which are not dependent on facts but on
reason alone, as is true of logic, metaphysics, arithmetic, geometry, the science of motion and also the science of law. For all these do not have their foundations in
experience and facts but serve to account for the facts and to regulate them in advance: and this would be true of justice even if there were no laws in the whole wide
world’ (Leibniz, Hauptschriften, Meiner, II, p. 510f.). The calculus within the rising bourgeoisie therefore serves not only the mathematical analysis of the turnover of
goods but also — in a less outwardly formal way — the antithesis to facts which hinder the rise of the bourgeoisie. Here, in Natural Right, pure reason is revolutionary;
and instead of b²owing to facts it posits security in nature. In a nature which is composed in a highly varied way: in one with rationally coherent laws, and then of course
also, in Rousseau, in one of opposition to all artificiality, in nature as simplicity, wildness, unspoiltness. Rousseau's concept of nature has almost completely lost the
character of rational laws, instead it is closely connected with all the enthusiasm at that time for simplity and democratic generality, with natural language, natural poetry,
natural religion, and natural education; all these ideals were monstrances in the axiom of nature. Thus, from this point of view as well, Natural Right acquired a lustre
which social utopias, after their chiliasm was toned down, could not match for a long time. But as far as the revolutionary effect of Natural Right at that time is
concerned, it certainly remained historically limited and extended less than social utopias into the future. Consider the close links of Natural Right with immediate
currents of society at that time, with thoroughly individualistic ones as well: could social revolution borrow something from these? The case is undoubtedly complicated,
Marx very often treats Natural Right as if it had been put on file for good, on bourgeois file. On the other hand, bourgeois reaction throughout the whole of the
nineteenth century speaks of Natural Right only with contempt and hatred. Does not this hatred do credit to Natural Right, does it not indicate a possible inherited