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“... Immanuel Kant​ was against revolutions. In 1793 he described them as the work of ‘political criminals’ and ‘injustice in the highest degree’. He accepted, on the other hand, that they sometimes turned out well: the Dutch had been lucky with theirs in 1579, for example, and so had the British in 1688. As for the French in 1789, it was too soon to say; but in one respect their revolution was already a glorious success: the wave of sympathy it had generated in the rest of the world showed that humanity was ready to move on from the old politics of unprincipled personal intrigue to a new politics of ‘lawful constitutions’ and ‘natural right’ – from the murderous madness of Richard III, you might say, to the enlightened benevolence of Nathan the Wise ...”

“... Whence comes​ this bizarre, bizarre idea,’ Jacques Derrida asks, reading Nietzsche on debt in On the Genealogy of Morals, ‘this ancient, archaic (uralte) idea, this so very deeply rooted, perhaps indestructible idea, of a possible equivalence between injury and pain (Schaden und Schmerz)? Whence comes this strange hypothesis or presumption of an equivalence between two such incommensurable things? What can a wrong and a suffering have in common?’ By way of an answer, he points out that ‘the origin of the legal subject, and notably of penal law, is commercial law; it is the law of commerce, debt, the market, the exchange between things, bodies and monetary signs, with their general equivalent and their surplus value, their interest ...”