End of Law

Drawing together both meanings of 'the end of law' - its completion and its cancellation - this book shows how this phrase provides the locus for the widely influential field of political theology. The end of law can imply at least two different things: either the perfection of law and state through conservative, liberal or socialist politics or its cancellation and abolishment through some kind of anarchist politics. Both of these interpretations of law can also be found in the history of theology. The theological description of the human as a fallen being entails a perspective on law as something that is a painful necessity; a curse that our species brought upon itself by lapsing into the history of death, work and violence that the story of the Fall depicts. This deeply theological perspective on law as a necessity or curse has structured the political and utopian imagination of many secular thinkers, including Schmitt, Kelsen and Benjamin. Law, exactly in its guarantee of order, peace and justice, is based on a force that always risks becoming anarchical; such that, the book maintains, law remains suspended between its completion, as a mechanism of justice, and its cancellation, as a mechanism of coercion. This sustained engagement with the field of political theology will appeal to legal theorists, philosophers, theologians, and political theorists.