用世俗的政治术语来表达，在一个被深深的种族的、经济的或其他的裂缝所撕裂的社会中，或者在一个普遍充斥着腐败、不公正和不平等的社会中，法院和律师不能维护合法性或者法治。只有通过实际交锋（或为了承认而斗争）来弥补或愈合这些裂缝，才可能恢复作为法律的规则治理的滋养土壤的共同的合理性。我相信，在一个跨文化的或国际的层面上，只有具体的分享的学习经验和非抽象的法令才能克服或抗衡根深蒂固的争斗的民族国家之间的“自然状态”。出于同样的原因，当前的社会的－政治的冲突不能通过诉诸共同的“传统”或者大概在过去起着作用的共识而被取消：与对伽达默尔的著作的简便阅读相反，传统并不是一种能够取消当前的（以及可预期的未来的）痛苦的简洁的公式。如同汉密尔顿所主张的，如果
宪法是人民的共同感（与更为受限制的立法权相区别）的表达，那么这一共同感不能被冻结或凝结在某一特定时刻——后来的各代保持沉默或者将其隶属于严格的祖先崇拜。在这种情况下，诠释学的调和也确实必须发挥自己的作用，将过去与现在的理解联结在一起，并且不给与主权统治以“原意”（或者任何其他的孤立的意图或偏好）；这种特权将把
宪法程式化为一种从解释实践的工作中被消除的抽象的文件，并从而削弱了常常痛苦地维持公共的合理性或伦理世界的生产力。如同黑格尔在《法哲学》（the Philosophy of Right）中谈到的，公共的伦理世界证明了客观地既定法和解释代理人或市民的主观自治之间的调和。他写到，“主观性与客观的和绝对的善的统一是伦理世纪或道德生活；在其中，我们发现了和解，因为它符合（善的）概念”。并且他补充说，“法律和（主观的）道德不能独立地存在，而是必须有伦理（Sittliche）作为它们的支撑和维持的基础”。[23]
【注释】Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 315-16, 320. In social-theoretical literature the same dichotomy surfaces in the contrast between "structure" and "event" as articulated by structuralist and poststructuralist writers. On this contrast see the comments by Michel Foucault and several interviewers in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 55-56, especially the following: "A whole generation was long trapped in an impasse, in that following the works of ethnologists, some of them great ethnologists, a dichotomy was established between structures (the thinkable) and the event considered as the site of the irrational, the unthinkable, that which does not and cannot enter into the mechanism and play of analysis at least in the form which this took in structuralism" (55).
Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). For the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary hermeneutics see Rorty, Philosophy, 320-21, 360.
On classical Greek thought see Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); see also Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), esp. 121-45. Regarding the transition from Greek to Hellenistic and Stoic thought, compare Foucault''s comments: "You can see, for instance, in the Stoics, how they move slowly from an idea of an aesthetics of existence to the idea that we have to do such and such things because we are rational beings—as members of the (universal) human community we have to do them" Foucault Reader, 354. In lieu of an "aesthetics of existence" I would prefer talking of a move from a "virtue ethics" to a deontological ethics. The notion of rule-governance is thematized by Foucault under the label mode d''assujettissement.
John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government (South Bend, Ind.: Gateway, 1955), 5-6, 109 (chap. 2, sec. 6; chap. 11, sec. 134).
Ibid., 110-14, 119 (chap. 11, secs. 135-37, 142).
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 81-82 (bk. 2, chap. 6).
