New Left Review 13, January-February 2002

ALAIN SUPIOT

ONTOLOGIES OF LAW

How should we understand the role of laws—of ordering, causality, positive law—within our modes of thought? As a starting point, we might consider Marcel Granet’s formulation—one calculated to floor a Western jurist—in summing up all he had encompassed in his classic work on China: ‘Bearing in mind’, Granet wrote, ‘that the Chinese never voluntarily submit to any constraint, not even a doctrinal one, I shall restrict myself to the observation: “Neither God Nor Law”.’ [1] La pensée chinoise (1934), Paris 1988, pp. 475–6. This attempt to ‘situate the most immense and most durable civilization ever known’ may help us to position Western thought as well. Granet was, of course, not implying that China lacked any notion of law: the Middle Kingdom had both administrative and penal codes. [2] See E. Balsz, La bureaucratie céleste, Paris 1968, p. 15ff. But it never developed the broader idea of civil law, on which the West’s concept of ‘civilization’ is founded. In the Confucian tradition, a ‘civilized’ man has no need of law: he has already internalized the whole art of social etiquette. Law—in its most rustic and brutal form: the penal code—would do well enough for those barbarians incapable of attaining such sophistication. [3] See J. Escarra, Le droit chinois, conception et évolution, Paris 1936; for a more naunced view, see Xiaoping Li, ‘L’esprit du loi chinois’, Revue internationale de droit comparatif, 1, 1997; for a terminological analysis, see T. Tsien, ‘Le concept de « loi » en Chine’, Archives de philosophie du droit, vol. 25, Paris 1980.

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