Positive law stabilizes human movement while totalitarian law makes man its embodiment.

Evidence

This identification of man and law, which seems to cancel the discrepancy between legality and justice that has plagued legal thought since ancient times, has nothing in common with the lumen naturale or the voice of conscience, by which Nature or Divinity as the sources of authority for the ius naturale or the historically revealed commands of God, are supposed to announce their authority in man himself. This never made man a walking embodiment of the law, but on the contrary remained distinct from him as the authority which demanded consent and obedience. Nature or Divinity as the source of authority for positive laws were thought of as permanent and eternal; positive laws were changing and changeable according to circumstances, but they possessed a relative permanence as compared with the much more rapidly changing actions of men; and they derived this permanence from the eternal presence of their source of authority. Positive laws, therefore, are primarily designed to function as stabilizing factors for the ever changing movements of men. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1043

Categorization

• DEFINE: Contrasts the traditional function of positive law (stable authority distinct from man, demanding consent) against the totalitarian equation of man with law.
• XREF: The man-as-embodied-law move contrasts with the module’s ‘hegemony and common sense’ material, where law and authority still demand internalization rather than identification.