THE ENEMY OF ALL

The pirate is the original enemy of humankind. Before humanitarian organizations, before human rights, before the codification of international law in the early modern period, the Roman jurists already made this point perfectly clear. As Cicero famously remarked, there are certain enemies with whom one may negotiate and with whom, circumstances permitting, one may establish a truce; but there is also an enemy with whom treaties are in vain and war remains incessant. This is the pirate, whom the ancient jurists considered to be, for this reason, the "enemy of the human kind" or, more simply still, "enemy of all".

Departing from Cicero's typology of foes, this book will reconstruct the shifting place of the pirate in the legal and political thought from the ancient to the medieval, modern, and contemporary periods. With an eye to the genealogy of a paradigm that has grown all too familiar in our time, it will explore how, and in what terms, it became possible legally to identify an international criminal to whom regular legal statues do not apply. THE ENEMY OF ALL will devote particular attention to the ways in which the definition of the pirate has continued to set in motion three distinct political and legal processes: the universalization of the enemy; the collapse of the distinction between criminal and political categories; and the transformation of the concept of war. One of the fundamental theses of this book will be that each of these three movements follows from the nature of the element that is proper to piracy. This is a domain that both demands and resists the claims of right: a singular "thing" which belongs to all and to none, and which the Romans, and many after them, them identified with the open seas.
F: Seuil; Italy; Quodlibet;

DER FEIND ALLER
Der Pirat und das Recht
Deutsch von Horst Bruehmann
[HC: Fischer 04/2010]