The Sublime in Law

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to  analyze the political negative reaction of Edmund Burke to the French revolution and its relation to his theory of the Sublime.

Burke’s reaction was meant to reverse the parallel between the French and the Glorious revolution maintained by his time English liberals. He succeded by portraing the French revolution as an “abuse of reason”, in comparison with the English revolution aimed to restore the historical ancient unwritten constitution.

In this way he “invented” an ideology of the Common Law as the supremacy of the un-written over the written laws of a country.  His theory then disclosed the possibility to consider a “political sublime” aspect of the law: sublime in the sense that there is a dimension of the law and the political which can never be fully captured by our words without remains, a side of the law which always defeating any attempt to ontologicize it and frame it within the boundaries of ordinary languafe and rational discourse.

This “sublime” aspect of the law and the political reveals so to be a major feature we should further investigate.

The conclusion of the author is, henceforth, that political romanticism must be reappraised in a way very different from that suggested by Carl Schmitt in his works.