Genocide: A Challenge to the Right to Life

Genocide: A Challenge to the Right to Life

Das Recht hat kein Dasein für sich, sein Wesen vielmehr ist das Leben der Menschen selbst, von einer Seite angesehen. – Savigny

Law has no existence for itself; rather its essence lies, from a certain perspective, in the very life of men.

At the edge of the modern era, the concept of biopolitics places the natural, biological life of the individual man as the sentient, driving force behind collective State power. Michel Foucault originally defined this term in The History of Sexuality: “For millennia,” he writes, “man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question.” (p. 188) It is this political concept of the sacredness of bare life that Savigny uses when he says that law’s essence lies in the very life of men. Only in the recent 20th century has there been a profound divergence from this concept; the respect for human existence for the sake of continued human existence has been called into question on a global scale through mass instances of repetitive genocide.

Therefore, legislation as deliberate law-making and the voice of the state of the sovereign body calls the common good of the life of man to the forefront of this question, both when democracy rules but primarily when totalitarian despots reign. The politicization of bare life as such legitimates the power of the sovereign state. But as repetitive instances of state-sponsored genocide have shown multiple times throughout the 20th century, state power can and does abuse the life of the citizen, whose life is paradoxically the force of the nation-state itself. It is through this e...

... middle of paper ...

...005. Print.

Anderson, George M. "Roots of Genocide." American Magazine. The National Catholic Review, 9 Feb. 2009. Web. 11 Nov. 2013. .

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and, 1951. Print.

Frankl, Viktor E. Man's Search for Meaning. Boston: Beacon, 2006. Print.

Kallis, Aristotle A. "Race, "value" and the Hierarchy of Human Life: Ideological and Structural Determinants of National Socialist Policy-making." Journal of Genocide Research (2005): 5-30. Print.

Traverso, Enzo. The Origins of Nazi Violence. New York: New, 2003. Print.

Woolf, Linda M., and Michael L. Hulsizer. "Psychosocial Roots of Genocide: Risk, Prevention, and Intervention." Journal of Genocide Research March (2005): 101-28. Web. 10 Nov. 2013. .