LAW AS REPRESENTATION

OF VALUE'
Jacques Ellul
THE PROBLEM dealt with here is the applicability of law. We know that
there is always a distance between the text of a law and its actual application,
but the question seems to me not "Why is the law not applied?" but "Why
is the law applied?" This question seems to me to contain an indirect response
to the recurrent question as to the foundation of law and to hold the possi-
bility of putting this interrogation in a way different from that of the tradi-
tional debate; for, in the last analysis, what is astonishing is that a juridical
system be generally applied.
I
IF THE LAW were a phenomenon of a metaphysical order or, on the other
hand, if it were of a purdy sociological order, it would not have any chance
of being commonly recognized and applied. It is necessary to note cardully
the considerable difference between a juridical system in its relation to indi-
vidual acts of disobedience, evasions, and frauds; and a juridical system
rejected globally by a whole society, from which all of the social groups tum
and which finally remains only as an empty corpse placed at the e.xterior of
the social system - for example, the law of the late Roman Empire or the
imperial law in medieval Germany. The second case manifests the inapplica-
bility of law, for, whatever the reasons, this law is not applicable and not
simply unapplied. In other words, there can be a juridical system accidentally
not applied although it is normally applicable, and there can be a juridical
system which is fundamentally inapplicable whatever effort and good will are
put into it.
Now this character of applicability does not depend upon law considered
in itself. No law exists which is metaphysically inapplicable. A perfectly
unjust law can be applicable, as, for example, the Nazi law. A perfectly just
law, such as Plato's system for Syracuse, can be inapplicable. Applicability
also does not depend on the mechanism of the sanctions provided. Some
laws with very rigorous sanctions have remained unapplied - for example,
the laws on rationing in France from 1940 to 1945. Conversely, some laws
without any sanction have been perfectly applied, such as the Roman leges
* TraRSlated by the staff of the FORUM.
54
JACQUES ELLUL 55
imperfectae. Moreover, we know that it is not because of the existence of
a sanction that we most frequently obey a law, or morc precisely, we know
that we apply it without asking ourselves a question as to the sanction, in
an entirely spontaneous way as if it was self-evidently right to do so. It is
not the threat of a punishment which makes us respect the law. Punishment
intervenes only in an accidental way, as a minor influence when one is hesi-
tating, "Shall I apply the law or not?" This question is only rarely posed
in a conscious fashion. The gangster is outside the legal system, and a
sanction scarcely makes an impression on him. "Normal" man lives by a
kind of spontaneous adaptation to the legal system.
Yet at the same time, the application of law is not the expression of a
pure and simple adaptation of the law to social contexts. This is the thesis
of sociologists according to whom the law is finally applied only because it
corresponds exactly to what is given economically and sociologically. But
this thesis, the exact converse of that of a pure Austinian approach, does not
seem satisfactory, 1be law is not a simple reflection of the economic structure,
as the Marxists maintain, nor is it the resultant of an equilibrium between
a multiplicity of social groups and tensions. The law is nonnative, or it has
no meaning. To transform it into a simple product of the social context is
to deprive it of all nonnative value, despite Gurvitch's theory on nonnative
fact.
l
If law is the simple expression of an adaptation to society, and so
would be applicable by the individual because he himself is adapted to the
group, then we could dispense with law, It would have no particular value
or importance, It would suffice to content oneself with the adaptation by
an individual to the attitudes and behavior of the groups of which he is a
part, Then we would have to answer the question, Why since the beginning
and in every civilization has man experienced the need of developing a law?
It is not an invention which is fortuitous and without significance,
I would also discard a third explanation. It does not seem to me that
the law is applicable because it contains some values which are eternal and
absolute and at the same time inscribed in the heart of man or in nature in
such a way that this agreement assures the applicability of law by man. It
seems to me that if we examine the juridical problem in itself, and in all
the forms which law has been able to take in the course of centuries and in
different cultures, we must escape the theological and metaphysical problem.
To escape it is not to deny it, or to take a position against it in adopting a
purdy naturalistic attitude; but we have to consider the law as it has been
and not as we wish that it had been. We have to admit that the Egyptian
1 GEOIlGES GURVITI:H, TIlAITE DE SOCIOI.OGIE vol. 2, ch. ~ (Pad5, 1960).
56
NATURAL LAW FORUM
law of the fifteenth century B.C., or the Aztec law, even though they were
alien to our values and did not express values we consider to be eternal, were
part of the juridical phenomena. Put another way I intend to examine the
problem without having to pronounce on the existence or nonexistence of
absolute nonus or supernatural values which may be inscribed in the law.
The law does not seem to me primarily designed to e.xpress religious or moral
truth. It has its own specific character.
In this domain of values I think it essential to recognize and admit the
variability of what we call values. The famous phrase: of Pascal on the dif
ference of justice on each side of the Pyrenees is classic.
2
We know better and
better, as history and anthropology reveal the values cherisho:l in different
cultures, to what dCgTec values can diverge and how even the same word
can receive a different content as time and place vary. It is not sufficient to
say that everJone agrees that law expresses justice. What is justice? There
is no unanimity of opinion. But I do not need to emphasize such proofs.
On the contrary, I wish to distinguish my position from that of a radical
relativism. Values are variable according to the culture, but that does not
imply that they are a simple reflection, ideological and contingent, of the
social environment. There is no automatism of a cultural kind for values.
They are not a superfluous procluct of an ensemble of social relations. In
particular, in regard to law, I am certain that those values which appear
in all societies are considered by the men of these societies as valid and as
possessing a certain force which is expressive, which means something, which
even constrains. The values in the law have a true ethical content. I cannot
accept the thesis that this view of law is a simple error of man in an infantile
stage of his development. Nor can I admit a facile psychologism which sees
in these values the mere projection of unconscious impulses. This kind of
thinking, which reduces value to an illusory dimension which it would be
easy to ignore, neglects a little too easily the global experience of humanity.
Humankind is not mistaken in attributing a unique character to its values,
although they are variable and without eternal content. To follow some
contemporary philosophers in judging mankind as the victim of illusions
and, indeed, stupid until our own times is to run the risk of showing that
it is we who are, in fact, imbeciles.
Values have a considerable importance though created by man. This
creation forces us to acknowledge their variable character, and yet I would
say that they are values because created by man. If we take man seriously,
if we consider him as a subject who expresses himself in history, then we
: BUIS!. PASCAL, hsshs 69 (eel. Bruruehvicg).
JACQUES ELLUL 57
have to take his works with a decisive seriousness and, above all, the whys
of his works, that which expresso at the same time the mood, not yet real-
ized, of what he wishes to be, and the impt:rative in relation to which he
judges himsdf. This is what I term a value. It is this phenomenon of projec-
tion of his absolute model and of his sclf-critical capacity which seCO\!l to
me justly the admirable element in values, recognizing that in t.his operation
man effectuates an advance which seems contrary to his own nature. Nature
impels him, on the one hand, to identify himself with projections which
glorify himself, and, on the other hand, to justify his permanence. Now it
is precisely this kind of nature: which does not permit the creation of values.
(1 do not prejudge here a supernatural intervention or a rtference
of these values to something absolute in itself.) In the measure in which
these values are a creation of man they evidently depend on circumstances
of time and place. They ought to evolve with the society in which a man
lives or they reprc:sc:nt nothing for a particular man. There is a permanent
relation betwa:n these values and the sociological context, because in the
same measure in which they concern the ethos of man they can only be in a
relation which is situated in the time and in the environment where this
behavior must take place. Yet these values also, to a degree, exptoS
an imperative which is beyond discussion for this particular man - from
this point of view they escape the sociologism by which an individual attempts
to place himseU outside of every culture in order to consider these relativized
values as without substance and without significance. Only God could have
this point of view, but a sociologist is not God; and what the Bible tells us
of such attempts of man is not without significance.
II
LAw IS, above all, representation. Everything depends on the way in which
man rtpresents to himself the law in order to obey it. Man never knows in
its objective reality the juridical system in which he lives. Man knows only
an image, an interpretation of the law. He makes for himself an idea of it
which can be completely ine.'(act or falsified, yet it is in relation to this
representation that he atablishes his own behavior and that he assumes an
attitude of adherence or rejection in relation to the law. It is never the law
in itself which man obeys, but the law which he represents to himseU. He
can thus be struck by a profound sense of injustice when the law is applied
to him in its reality when he sees it, and therefore lives it, differently. The
application of the law by the administrator and the judge depends on the
law itself, its objective reality. But the applicability of the law, that is, the
58 NATURAL LAW FORUM
fact that spontaneously, and by a kind of tacit consent, the citizen nonnally
behaves as the law intends, is entirely another thing, and his adherence de-
pends on his representation of it. In relation to it he feels a sentiment of
satisfaction or of revolt or of indifference.
The difference between representation and reality is not simply the product
of poor infonnation. It is not because the citizen is badly infenned of the
textual content of the laws that he acts in this way. The phenomenon is
more profound: in every case we perceive reality only through our prejudices,
images, ideologies, etc., and we cannot distinguish objective knowledge
from the interpretation spontaneously furnished by our consciousness. Such
interpretation makes a man live in his culture and so in a system of particular
Jaw. Thus a system, perfectly satisfying from the point of view of juridical
logic or even from the viewpoint of justice, can be instable 'as it is actually
lived by a man. He will do everything pussible to escape it, as happened,
for example, in the later Roman Empire. On the contrary, a system which
is abhorrent in our eyes may be lived as legitimate and acknowledged by
the immense majority of citizens, as, e.g., the Hitlerian law. We then can
say that the spontaneous adhesion of Everyman, of the average man of a
society, is the condition of the applicability of law, and that this adherence
depends upon the representation which that man makes of it to himself.
This representation only secondarily bears on the concrete dispositions
of the law itself; the representation bears on the values which the man
imagines to be in the law. This is the really significant phenomenon: What
is it that any man sees in the law of his society as represented value? What
representation of value does he make to himself through the law? Anything
else is only secondary. Doubtless there is a certain importance that the foons
of the law, its procedures, be understandable, that the man not meet the
law as an obstacle, not feel himself reduced by it to the slate of an object.
Indeed, it is not without importance that a man feel a common measure
with the law, that it not be for him a totally foreign domain. Finally, it is
important that a man have a certain representation of the concrete rules
of law. But the representation (true or false, it doesn't matter; what matters
is this representation) made by a man of the concrete rules is only a reference
to a representation of values. When a man represents to himself such and
such a procedure and understands more or less well and sees the objective
result of it he may say, "That is unjust"; at this moment one could explain
to him minutely how this procedure was regular and how one could not
do it another way, and not convince him. Yet it is evident that he does not
have a clear sense of what justice is and even less of what the law concretely
should be in order that one could say of it, "It is just." What is certain is
JACQUES ELLUL 59
that in this value judgment on the law on the occasion of a concrete case
a man expresses his expectation that the law contain the value of justice,
that in living this law one can say, "That is just," At the same time the
man his failure to adhere to this law and thereby testifies to this
degree of inapplicability in the law. If his sentiment becomes general, if
men have this representation of their law, that it is unjust, oppressive, un-
worthy of confidence, then the law ceases to be really applicable, even if
formally and for a time it is applied. A society where the applicability of
law no longer holds is a society in danger. There is a kind of sociomoral
hemorrhage in a group of this order which cannot be indefinitely maintained
on the basis of either a purely spontaneous structure or a purely formal order.
Thus, at the meeting point between the way a man represents the law
to himself and the image of himself and his society which he hopes to find
in the law, at the meeting point of these two representations, is posed the
problem of value in the law as well as the problem of the creation of values.
These problems are presented under the two aspects that, as represented, law
is necessarily a value and creator of value and that it is the representa-
tion of value.
III
"As represented." Again I do not prejudge the problem of "in itself." I do
not say "in itself the law is value and creator of value." We never finally
know what the law is in itself, and it is not on this notion that its application
depends. In men's eyes law is value. It is not an idea, it is not a philooophical
analysis which we grasp, it is not simply an accidental phenomenon or even
an illusion (as the Marxists would like to have it). In all cultures the law
is surrounded by an exceptional prestige, whether it is related to the sacred,
whether it is invested with a social respect symbolized in the cootume of the
judges. Such symbolism is not designed to impose on people, to carry out
a bluff; it to the representation of majesty which the people
make of the law.
We see the importance of this sentiment when a citizen feels concretely
that the law of his society is justly not a value, because, for example, it pro-
duces unjust results or serves to oppress the weak. Then the insignia of the
judge strike him as derisory and empty of meaning, and he tums against the
judge his hatred and his scorn. Violence becomes the inverse expression of
the conviction that law is value. The depth of this sentiment appears when
war or revolution is waged "in the name of law." It is a reason for action
that man possesses in the deepest being, even if he does not give a clear and
60 NATURAL LAW FORUM
evident content to the notion of law. Among the values which give meaning
to the collective life of man, there is law.
It is true that if as a jurist one looks at the positive law, the concrete facts
of legislation, and the details of procedure, the weaknesses of our systems,
their delays and uncertainties, are apparent. We could not ask a man to
sacrifice his life to maintain this positive law. Yet it is positive law which
is in man's eyes the law, the value. He does not sec an idea, an ahstraction.
The law as it exists, but taken globally, is effectively seen by Everyman to the
extent that it is value. It is as value that the law is applicable and that the
citizen is normally, spontaneously, and generally led to obey it. But if the
citizen has this global view of the law as value it is not the consequence of
an illusion; his view rests on the fact that he expects something: protection,
justice, order, troth, principles of behavior, meaning of social actions, etc.
In other words, he expects that the law contain values to which he can relate
himself and in which he can have confidence. .A.s the law is for man, it is
caUed to create values much more than to create rules, institutions, organi-
zations. The latter are essential for the jurists; their importance is often a
cause of misunderstanding between the jurists and the ordinary man. The
jurist seeks to refine the rules and to make the norms better. This does not
interest the ordinary man. He expects the law to express such and such a
value; he docs not see it with clarity in such and such an institution. The
jurist, frequently obeying his particular logic, leads the law towards more
rigorous technicality and loses sight of what is essential, that each rule and
each institution be related to a value which is expressly created by the law.
The jurist should not forget that the applicability of the law dots not depend
on him or on the particular value of an organization, but on the adherence
which a man gives it because of the satisfaction he experiencts in it. Each
element of the law must be for the individual a factor in which value appears.
In the measure in which this value which man expects from law is present,
in the measure in which it varies with the actual ps)'chosociological data, you
can say, without entering into metaphysical debate, that the law is, to the
extent that it is representation, the creator of value and can only be that.
What the law is called to give to man in a given social, economic, political
situation is a system of references which ptrmit him to live, to subsist, to find
a balance, to defend himself, to affirm himself. It must give a system of
references which cannot be purely philosophical; they would be inaccessible
to the average man. Nor can they be purely material and political; a man
also needs autonomy and coherence. This system of references - real, reo
sponding to a concrete situation, armed with a variety of powers of action
-must be at the same time a system of ideal morality. OnIy the law fur-
JACQUES ELLUL 61
rushes the man this glohal totality of great complexity. It is in this sense
that I say that law is for man a creator of values.
The law is not merely an expression of eternal values. If it were, there
would be no possible evolution, no actualization, whatever specifications of
the law were made. The passage from natural law to positive law has never
to my knowledge been explained. One reaches only the most risky hypotheti-
cal "ought to be." But man cannot satisfy himself with this "ought to be."
Yet when I say that law is creator of value I do not speak in the same sense
as Kelsen, who used the same formula.
3
Three points which distinguish my
position from that of Kclsen arc these: For Kelsen it is never the content
which makes the law but the reality of a system of norms conditioning each
other, while for me it is the very existence of these values which makes the
law and which determines its applicability as they do or do not bring satis-
faction to the men of a particular society. In the second place, for KeLsen
the values are legitimately set by the norm when the norm has observed the
formal conditions of competence and of procedure set by the anterior norm;
for me values are legitimate only when they respond to a totality of data
given outside the juridical system. The composition of these data is extremdy
variable according to the society: they may be religious and spiritual, or
moral, or psychological, or economic, or political. Moreover, the form of
direct expression of these factors can also vary extremely with time and place:
it may be an action at law, or a system, or a philosophy, or a technique, or
a revolutionary blow, or a religious pressure or even something else. Finally,
for Kelscn the values contained in law arc arbitrary, i.e., chosen by a pure
act of human willj for me the values created by law can never be arbitrary.
When they are, they make the law essentially inapplicable. No doubt there
is a place for voluntary creation, since there will be a judge who finally
expresses these values in a particular way. It is he who will make an estimate
of the extrajuridical factors. It is he who must consequently formulate the
values which are necessary for man in this situation, It is he who must find
in the arsenal of his juridical technique the means of putting these values
into action, and who must bring to the individual the satisfaction of a real
representation of these values. But in his decision the judge can be mistaken;
and it is finally the individual's adherence to, or the implicit rejection of,
the values expressed by the law which teaches the judge whether he is m i s ~
taken or not.
We meet here a related problem. The law, from our perspective, is not
the sale creator of values. Morality and philosophy are evidently, and ob-
HANS KeLSN, GN1lAL THIWR.Y OF LAW AND THe STATE (tJ:. by ADders Wedberg,
Cambridge, 1949).
62 NATURAL LAW FORUM
viously in the first rank, the great creators of values in a given society. Yet
the creation of values in and by law is, in reality, a great deal more decisive.
In the creation of values by the moralist or the philooopher there is no risk,
no involvement, no counterpart. If they fail, if the values proposed do not
correspond in the end to anything for man and are forgotten, there is nothing
changed in the society or for the individual. It is a setback on the intellectual
plane and at the individual levd, nothing more. But in the law we are in
the presence of social scales. In a changing situation man must have this
resource. He must have a law which is applicable and which responds both
to the global structure and to the concrete situation of man.
4
If the law is
mistaken, both society and individual are going to suffer; and history shows
us that recuperation from these errors is long, and rectification very slow.
The seriousness of the creation of values in the law sterns precisely from
our not being on the plane of gratuitous and ideological invention, but on
the plane of necessity, of collective action and interests. At this level it is no
longer possible to fonnulate some kind of absolute generosity; it would be
rapidly exhausted by the conflicts of interests. However brilliant the idea,
it would be rapidly destroyed by the mechanism of necessity. In the ever-
renewed search by man for values which give meaning to his life the law
seems to me to be the privileged place of representation and this experience.
We cannot renounce this vocation of the law. But we always come back
to this limit: it is a matter of representation, and at this level the experience
is not a technical application but a true creation of values.
Not only is the law representation, but it is representation of values; and
the applicability of the law depends essentially on this representation. The
representation which man makes to himseU of the positive law can reach
this second degree only in a representation of the values included in this law.
The law must contain values, and man must have an image of it. Beyond
the objectivity of the law which, as the result of a rigorous analysis by a
philosopher or a jurist, contains an expression of the value of justice, there
are what Everyman feels as justice and the image which he makes for him-
self of the content of value of the actual juridical system. In the measure
in which the values seen by the law are received for such in the social c o n ~
sciousness and by each member of the group, in the measure in which they
have significance for the collectivity and for the individual, in the measure
in which there is adequation between what the individual expects of the
working of these values and what the law effectively carries out - the group
and the individual will accept the law as it is, will adhere to its specifications,
4 By global structure I mean the structures (economic, political, intellectual, etc.)
corresponding to a given cultural syslem.
JACQUES ELLUL 63
and will recognize it as the normative law of their society. It is in the measure
in which the values represented by the law correspond to a representation
of values believed in and accepted by each one that, in the end, the law
can be respected and, indeed, put into action. It is, in effect, only when
there is agreement between the values assumed by the law and the values
represented that the law can have a content and an objectivity and become
a series of relations. Only the value which is recognized can become the
content of the law. For the individual there is finally no other. It is this
which establishes the content of a certain action or certain relations which
are submitted to law. What is true for the individual is tTue for groups and
the state itself. The law claims a certain confonnity to a certain datum, to
a certain type, which is considered as invested with a value. It is only in
the measure in which the individual accepts it as such that he will live in this
confonnity. This does not mean that valuc depends more or less on thc fan-
tasies of an individual; in reality we are faced with a profound, slow, and
lasting creation. Nor does it mean that we arc at the level of conscious deci-
sions and choices. The representation effected is always relatively vague and
uncertain, but it implies the po6sibility of agreement and of adherence. This
does not mean that the jurist has to limit himself to hearing what is said
and formulating it, or to tramlating automaticaIIy into law every ideological
product of his society. There is necessarily a certain tension between what
the law must contain as value and the freedom in which the individual would
like to live. But the representation of value effected by the individual on the
subject of the law should not be such that the individual rejects the law
either because of an impossibility of understanding or of execution or b e ~
cause of an absolute separation between the values assumed by the law and
those which the individual recognizes as his own. The relation would then
be one of pure constraint which, as I have said, is finally untenable.
In the second place, the value represented in the law appears as the
common measure, the system of reference, the standard which pennits the
correct evaluation of a situation or an action. Because we are in an area
of men and not of objects, it is immediately understandable that it is i m p o s ~
sible to have a system of purely objective references. The situation docs not
resemble that of a doctor who can establish tables of references or standards
of measure which arc objective and valid, independent of the opinion of
each person. Because the totality of the relation of man with his social group
is involved, we are obliged to take as the system of references only what can
be a common measure - a communal measure ~ one to which there is final-
ly a certain measure of agreement. A man feels himself validly judged only
if he is judged on the basis of values which he himself admits. If that is not
64 NATURAL LAW FORUM
the case, he can only feel something arbitrary and unjust. When the values
contained in the law are represented by the individual to the individual as
his own, then these values can help him in giving his own acts a meaning,
a note, a qualification. It is no longer that "they judge me by absurd and
iniquitous laws." It is "1 am about to do something which is unacceptable
- to myself." Let us not say that this is a substitute for moral conscience.
It is simply that this individual recognizes as legitimate that his act be meas-
8Ured on the basis of an entirely objective role which he can make subjec-
tive because the values given in it are also those which he gives himself.
Finally, it is also in the measure in which law is representation of value
that it can play its nonnative role in the most profound sense. I mean that
the law can never be taken as in itself a realization of value. It is, rather,
a possibility offered to man to achieve the realization of value. Value can
never be considered as an existent, an immutable essence, a preestablished
model from which one must begin, stilllc:ss as a kind of static reality included
in the law, a reality which is permanent when it has been correctly f o r m u ~
lated and which the individual would only have to contemplate in the law
like the models of those symbolic statutes of the nineteenth century repre-
senting Justice, Liberty, Peace, in a perfectly immobile situation. In this
age a man cannot feel himself moved by these necessarily abstract models.
The law, as representation of value, supposes a tension toward an objective
to be obtained, a new situation to be created. A man who represents to him-
self the value included in the law does not receive it as a schema on which
he has to model himself, to which he has to conform his person. He receives
it as a realization to be achieved, a situation to be created by his own activity.
One can sum up his feeling roughly as follows: "If 1 obey this legal rule which
expresses a value which 1 recognize as mine, then I create a situation of
justice or of order or of peace." But he cannot obey this rule if he does not
recognize the value it expresses. When the individual is not engaged in
passive obedience but in a creation of situations where the values of the
law he represents to himself are destined to appear, then the law has fully
fulfilled its role.
It is necessary to take care that this is not a game. It is not without
importance whether the Jaw does or does not fulfi.ll this role. If the law is
not a creator of value, and if the individual cannot represent to himself the
values included in the law as his own, extremely serious consequences follow.
The fiI"5t is that there may be two radically separated areas, that of law and
that of life. This is not a new problem, but it is a problem often badly stated
when one speaks of "the time lag between law and events" or when it is
suggested that the separation is chiefly between the law and economic or
JACQUES ELLUL 65
political phenomena. If it were thus, a solution would be easy enough. p ~
cedurtS could be modified, adaptations could be made more rapidly. But
it may happen that, when the law is no longer received or understo<xl by the
citizens, it remains a closed world, that the nonns are only submitted
to without being taken up by men. The separation is then not on the level
of a divorce between general norms and the concrete situation of a particular
individual. What is true in the individual case is true of all the representa-
tions of society and law. The divorce between law and life is now situated
at the level of these representations. Juridical means cannot now influence
these representations. At stake is the global question of law - its principles,
its values, its expressions. What is necessary is a total reshaping of law in its
foundations, not some fragmentary adaptation to this or that economic or
social fact. When such a divorce of law and life has occurred, one is in the
presence of a very serious symptom for society and a decisive threat to its
duration.
The second consequence, resulting from the first, is that, in the measure
in which the individual does not recognize himself in the representation of
law, he is obliged to substitute something. Then the creation of another
system of values takes place, a creation more or less spontaneous, but nega-
tive. It cannot be hoped that) since the values of the law do not satisfy man,
he is going to elaborate in his group a new system of values helping him to
live. If that were true, we could say that the divorce between the two sys-
tems is regrettable, but that in the end something is born giving rise to a
new law. The situation is, unfortunately, more complex and treacherous.
Man does not remain unharmed in the face of law when he cannot accept
the representation he makes of it. This cannot be a matter of simple indif-
ference. To follow the metaphor of divorce, we know that in a divorce ending
a marriage the two fonner spouses who have "to remake their lives" cannot
start from a new situation, from zero, as if nothing had happened. In fact,
they are going to start with a whole set of disturbances, unresolved internal
conflicts, regrets, and hates which have been part of their life. It is the
same when a man is divorced from the law of the society in which he lives,
when the representation he makes to himself of the values of the law can-
not correspond to the values he wishes to incorporate in his life. Then the
system which he creates for himseU expresses forcefully his detestation of
everything which fonnerly he associated with the law - judgments, admin-
istrative rules, attitudes of the police or the bureaucracy. He rejects what
would strike us as legitimate often without our understanding why, because
he has broken with what he thinks inspires all that, its heart and its reason.
His rejection will be the more violent and will seem the more unjust to us
66 NATURAL LAW FORUM
as his new system of values is founded on frustration and resentment. He
had hoped and waited for justice, liberty, and peace from the law; he had
not found them in it; and he could no longer live with respect for the law.
or with respect for society. He expresses now only hate of what should
have been and has not been. He will live only in the perspective provided
by the impossibility, as he sees it, that the law be anything else but decep-
tion, hypocrisy, lying. The system of values of creation is purely negative,
and a new law cannot emerge from it. In this situation it is not the indi-
vidual who has to be reformed. It is the law which has to be radically
changed; for in its representation, it is here evident, the law has failed its
vocation.