Extract

I. Herleitung der fundamentalen Differenz

„Man being born, as has been proved, with a title to perfect freedom, and an uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature equally with any other man or number of men in the world, hath by nature a power not only to preserve his property – that is, his life, liberty, and estate – against the injuries and attempts of other men, but to judge of and punish the breaches of that law in order as he is persuaded the offence deserves, even with death itself, in crimes where the heinousness of the fact in his opinion requires it. But because no political society can be nor subsist without having in itself the power to preserve the property, and, in order thereunto, punish the offences of all those of that society; there, and there only, is political society, where every one of the members that quitted this natural power, resigned it up into the hands of the community in all cases that exclude him not from appealing for protection to the law established by it. And thus all private judgement of every particular member being excluded, the community comes to be umpire, by settled, standing rules, indifferent, and the same to all parties.“

Dieser Auszug aus der Second Treatise of Government von John Locke beschreibt – in Übereinstimmung mit heutigen Interpreten wie Wolfgang Kersting - das Grundverständnis des modernen Liberalismus. Der Paragraph 87 hat seinen...