ABSTRACT
Tom Campbell has observed that '[e]very legal theory requires a political setting and no political philosophy should lack a theory of law'.2 His own recent work seeks to make good these requirements by recommending ethical positivism as a 'highly political theory of law'3 - a response not only, but above all, to what he calls 'the tragic paradox of politics, according to which states are both highly necessary and extremely dangerous'. 4 In this chapter I explore this paradox, as setting and source of a political philosophy from which ethical positivism gains plausibility, and discuss some implications that have been drawn from it. I endorse some of these implications and question others.
