How is it possible that Tacitus is still relevant in Yugoslavia today? Well, the fact is that he is hardly relevant any more. His law fails to reach beyond the law, where the boundary between the law and its complement has long been obliterated. The very notion has become meaningless once the residuum has disappeared. The legal categories have been dissolved once they ossified every social relation. Everyone and everything has become suspect, and thus free. Absolutely free. The res publica itself has vanished. Crushed under its own weight, it turned into a private domain. The suspended individual has imploded, and found nothing. This brittle result is nevertheless the highest expression of order that lurks behind the sparkling vacuum. This order is thus beyond destruction: it lacks every structure already. Tacitus transcended![2]

Addendum (August 10, 1986)

An old Chinese said he had heard that when empires were doomed they had many laws.

From Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Will to Power, New York: Vintage Books, 1968, p. 394.

Footnotes

1. Ljubo Sirc, an embittered man, writes (The Yugoslav Economy Under Self-Management, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979, p. 236):

The fiercest and best articulated attack on legal inflation in Yugoslavia came in 1972: Kosta Čavoski, in a paper published in Gledišta (Nos. 5-6), opened his criticism by quoting Tacitus: “Corruptissima res publica, plurimae leges.” In his view the abundance of laws was not a consequence of the complexity of our times, but of “spiritual sterility.” There was no legal security despite the formal granting of all sorts of freedoms and rights. They were granted with one hand and then abolished with the other by means of explanatory provisions, allegedly to implement their real content. The incessant changes in the Constitution every two years only proved that it was not patterned on any higher idea but was merely an expression of arbitrariness. Laws could not become simply a weapon in the hands of “alienated power.” Čavoski was sent to prison.

Amen!

2. The reader should be warned that this is a mere parable. Est modus in rebus.