Authors
Markus Dirk Dubber
Publication date
1998/3/1
Journal
Law and History Review
Volume
16
Issue
01
Pages
113-146
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Description
The Enlightenment was the age of empathy and abstract identity. The common man no longer was to be pitied for his unfortunate plight. Instead, enlightened gentlemen and reformers strove to empathize with the ordinary person—identify with him—precisely because he was identical to them in some fundamental sense. That sense differed from Enlightenment theory to theory, but the identity remained central. So Bentham insisted that every member of the utility community was like any other because every member's pain and joy equally affected the utilitarian calculus and thus the common good. Contractarians like Beccaria or Fichte portrayed all citizens as identical insofar as they were all signatories to the social contract, a contract grounded in the shared rationality of its signatories who surrendered some of their external freedom to pursue their life plans protected from the chaos of the law of nature. And Kant and …
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