law of the jungle

名词 n.

英文释义

名词 n.
  1. A putative law dictating that one serves one's own interest to the extent that one can, in any situation where legal authority is absent or generally ignored; self-interested behaviour that emerges in the absence of law; lawlessness. figuratively
    — 1938, Proceedings of the Sixth Conference of Teachers of International Law and Related Subjects, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, page 111, In the next war there will be no international law or 'comity of nations' but merely the law of the jungle, and of primeval man—each for himself and the devil take the next man.
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see law, jungle.
    — The Law of the Jungle — which is by far the oldest law in the world — has arranged for almost every kind of accident that may befall the Jungle People, till now its code is as perfect as time and custom can make it.

词源

Introduced by Rudyard Kipling in his book, The Jungle Book (1894), in which he used the term in the literal sense of a legal code governing the behavior of his anthropomorphized animals in an Indian jungle. Note also the (possibly derived) colloquial sense of jungle (“a place where people behave ruthlessly, unconstrained by law or morality”).
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