учебный год 2023 / Tradition

1068 The Yale Law Journal [Vol. 99: 1029

existence our own remembrancedepends. Indeed, in the absence of any means of enforcement,the only basis we have for believing our successors will preservewhat we have done is our own willingness to carry on the projectsof those who came before, despite their inability to compel our collaboration.If we have any grounds for believing that the future will honor what we do, it can therefore only be the uncompelled honor we

show the past. The partnershipamongthe generations-"a partnershipin

all science;a partnershipin all art; a partnershipin every virtue, and in all perfection"107-thus depends for the attainment of its ends on each generation'streatingthe achievementsof its predecessorsas somethingin-

culture can be sustained.This traditionalistattitude, which is an ingredi- ent in every argument from precedent,however limited or qualified the claims of that argumentmay be, is of course something no thinker who surveys the realm of culture from the standpointof eternity can accept, either in the law or out. That is understandable.What I have been trying to suggest in these concludingpages is that this same attitude is also, and not inconsistently,a conditionof our humanity, of our distinctiveidentity as human beings.

Simone Weil expressedthe point perfectly. "The past once destroyed," she wrote, "never returns. The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatestof all crimes. Today the preservationof what little of it remains ought to becomealmost an obsession."'08Weil wrote these words in 1943,

when the fate of Europeancivilizationwas in doubt. But we still need the obsessionshe describes,if our world is to retain its human shape. Indeed, with the earth drawn up into the world of culture and now placed within our trust, we need it on a planetary scale.

107.Id. at 194.

108.S. WEIL,THE NEEDFORROOTS51-52 (A. Wills trans. 1952).