ABSTRACT In the Critique of Violence, 1921, 1 Walter Benjamin contemplated a situation in which the exercise of a legal right by an individual could be construed as a violent assault upon the state. Such an assault would entitle the state to respond with greater force in the interests of its self-preservation. 2 For Benjamin, it was the exercise of worker rights which potentially threatened the state. 3 Today the perceived source of the threat to state stems equally from claims for racial justice. This article examines the extent to which Benjamin’s account of the state’s necessarily ambivalent relation to the legal rights which it confers upon individuals 4 can provide a fitting framework within which to examine how, after a period of expansion of individual rights in various economic and social spheres in the latter half of the twentieth century, this century has seen significant retrenchment, with access to legal aid and voluntary legal services being severely restricted in an effort to direct individuals toward non-legal means of dispute resolution. A key argument advanced is that the various impulses which draw individuals toward alternative dispute mechanisms can be construed as law-preserving violence in the precise sense in which Benjamin deployed the term.

中文翻译：

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沃尔特·本杰明，种族和权利批判

摘要 在 1921 年的《暴力批判》中，1 沃尔特·本杰明 (Walter Benjamin) 考虑了一种情况，在这种情况下，个人行使合法权利可被解释为对国家的暴力攻击。这种攻击将使国家有权以更大的力量作出回应，以维护自身的利益。2 对本杰明来说，可能威胁到国家的是工人权利的行使。3 今天，对国家的威胁的感知来源同样源于种族正义的主张。本文考察了本雅明关于国家与其授予个人 4 的法律权利之间必然矛盾的关系的说明在多大程度上可以提供一个合适的框架，在该框架内检查个人权利在各个经济和社会领域的一段时间扩展后如何在二十世纪下半叶，本世纪出现了重大裁员，获得法律援助和自愿法律服务的机会受到严格限制，以努力引导个人采用非法律方式解决争端。提出的一个关键论点是，在本杰明使用该术语的确切意义上，将个人吸引到替代性争议机制的各种冲动可以被解释为维护法律的暴力。