Limits on the Coercive Power of Law

In her celebrated work “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil”, Hannah Arendt persuasively argued how authority and blind obedience lead to evil. It becomes crystal clear from our preceding discussion that the use of force or the threat of punishment is not justifiable in securing of rights. It merely creates a façade of right-conformism without addressing the underlying issues of rights and responsibilities. Law is a social construct and not the other way around. Denying this is like creating a mega-structure of laws with Divine attributes of immutability. “Recourse to social ties”, according to Ponty, “cannot be considered an explanation of religion or of the sacred unless one makes an immutable substance of the social, an all-round cause, a vague force defined only by its power of coercion.”