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From avenging to revolutionary force

In his film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance John Ford confronts us with two understandings of law. First we have Liberty Valance, the villain in his natural state, who haunts the ‘open ranges’1 in the west of the United States. His social basis consists in the cattle barons, who, like him, prefer the natural state to that of established law. Liberty Valance is a supporter of philosopher Thomas Hobbes. He has the same theory, but he draws other practical conclusions from it than did the founder of modern political philosophy. For Liberty Valance, as for Hobbes, liberty is the subjective right to everything he can and wants to get hold of by applying a gunslinger’s power. Hobbes speaks of the ‘Right of Nature, which Writers commonly call Jus Naturale’. The natural law ‘is the Liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himselfe, for the presentation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own Life; and consequently, of doing any thing, which in his own Judgement, and Reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto’.2 His student Liberty Valance refers to this as the ‘Western Law’. The latter’s employers, the ‘cattlemen’, speak of the ‘law of survival’. For Liberty, the positive law of the nationalized east coast is nothing but a limitation of his subjective liberty, a Hobbesian Leviathan. Positive law is repression, an instrument of the state’s self-assertion and selfpreservation. Law limits the free mobility of the subjects of law, as a levee limits the wild course of a river. The traditional line of argumentation which predominantly recognizes the sujet, the subjectum subjected to the rule of others, in the subject of law, reaches from Hobbes to Carl Schmitt, orthodox-Marxist criticism, American ‘legal realism’,