Jewish law and tradition in the early work of Erich Fromm

pp. 128-144

in: Margarete Kohlenbach, Raymond Geuss, The early Frankfurt school and religion, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005

Abstract

Within post-Kantian, liberal accounts of law, freedom emerges as the law that is moral. Opposed to the relative and restricted necessity of positive law, freedom is understood as a law that is individual and autonomously given. The space of such self-determination is protected, usually negatively, by positive law. Freedom and necessity, morality and law, autonomy and heteronomy: these summarise the oppositions within which much modern thinking has moved and moves to this day.