ABSTRACT
The modern nation state, with its two defining spheres, the sphere of popular sovereignty and the sphere of freedom from it, emerged in the turbulent epoch of the French Revolution after a long period of struggle in the realm of world history. The revolution’s most glorious achievement was that it eventually transferred the idea of freedom, the idea that it is in man’s nature to be born free, from theoretical into practical existence. For thinkers and political practitioners of that era, it became a common place that ‘the revolution received its first impulse from philosophy’ (Hegel 1900: 446). The ‘Declaration of the rights of man and citizen’, passed by the French National Constituent Assembly in August 1789 is usually seen as a decisive step towards the realisation of the philosophical principles of natural law (Habermas 1974: 82–120). As a direct consequence of the overthrowing of a monarch by an absolutely sovereign French nation, all political and legal advantages previously accorded to some privileged estates of society vanished. Uniform legal norms defining the rights and liberties of men became the basic premise of modern statehood. This ‘liberty of moderns’ presupposes the right of everyone to be subjected only to laws, to express their opinion, to choose a profession and practice it, to dispose of property, to associate with other individuals and to directly or indirectly influence administration of government (Constant 1819). It was recognised even by the modern state’s most brilliant critic, Karl Marx, that this development was undeniably a step forward with respect to the feudal epoch, in which classes of civil society were the same as political classes, given that civil state was at the same time a political state (Marx 1994: 293).
