ABSTRACT
The need to secure civil peace from unstoppable religious civil war occasioned an extraordinary displacement in political rationality: the installation of a State with absolute powers over the confessional contestants. The shock wave of this displacement is still passing over us. Raison d’état remains an outrage to moral sensitivities ignorant of its historical justification. The grant of ethical autonomy to governmental and legal institutions still seems intolerable, as does the notion that the ‘laws are not moral because they correspond to an eternal legality of morals, although they may do this; they are moral because they have originated in a commandment derived directly from the political situation’. We still have every difficulty comprehending that moral arrangements might depend on the establishment of a State in which ‘[i]t is not a frame of mind or a correct measure that makes a virtue out of virtue, but its political foundation’(Koselleck 1988:37).
