a widespread concept of political and legal thought, denoting the aggregate or collection of principles, rules, laws, and values dictated by human nature and therefore seemingly independent of concrete social conditions and the state.
Natural law has always appeared as a value category relative to the legal order in force in a given political society and to the system of social relations consolidated by such a legal order. In views serving as apologetics this system and the existing laws are declared to be in conformity with natural law and natural justice; views calling for social transformations declare the society and its laws to be in contradiction with natural law and justice. During the long history of natural law its content has varied according to the historical conditions, as well as the social and political positions of its proponents. F. Engels noted that natural law and natural justice are the “ideologized, glorified expression of existing economic relations, now from their conservative, and now from their revolutionary angle” (K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 18, p. 273).
The idea of natural law had already developed in ancient times, especially in the classical world. It was used by the Greek Sophists and Aristotle and was central to Stoicism. Along with civil and popular law Roman jurists singled out natural law (jus naturale) as a reflection of the laws of nature and the natural order. Cicero stated that a law of the state that contradicted natural law could not be viewed as law.
During the Middle Ages natural law was primarily theological in form. It was an integral part of religious doctrine: in the teaching of Thomas Aquinas, for example, natural law is the concrete expression of divine reason guiding the world and the basis of law created by the state. Even today the idea of natural law continues to be a part of the official theological and political doctrine of the Catholic Church.
The idea of natural law had its greatest social influence in the 17th and 18th centuries as a fundamental ideological weapon in the struggle of the progressive forces of society against the feudal structure. The ideologues of the Enlightenment, such as Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Diderot, P. Holbach, and A. N. Radishchev, used the idea of natural law widely to criticize the feudal orders as a contradiction of natural justice. In these views natural law was set forth as the unchanged principles of man’s nature and reason. These principles were to be embodied in laws, entailing the substitution of rule by law for rule by men (that is, absolutism). The ideas of natural law were reflected in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), the American Declaration of Independence (1776), and other documents. During the same period (17th-18th centuries) there were attempts to justify feudal-absolutist regimes with the aid of natural law (for example, S. von Pufendorf in Germany).
With the stabilization of the capitalist order, 19th-century bourgeois ideologists renounced natural law, declaring the bourgeois system to be the only possible and just order, not requiring supralegal criteria for its justification. Positivism opposed the idea of natural law especially vigorously.
The 20th century has seen the so-called renaissance of natural law. This occurred because the transition of capitalism to the monopolistic and then the state-monopolistic stage required the reevaluation of many legal institutions, which both included natural law and was conducted with its aid. Increased consciousness of the working masses forced the bourgeois ideologists to seek popular slogans that could be directed against socialist ideas, and the theory of natural law was convenient for these purposes (for example, the rejection of private property is declared to be a violation of the fundamental principles of natural law). Since World War II natural law has been used in West Germany, Italy, and certain other countries, on the one hand, as a demarcation line to indicate a difference from fascist ideology and, on the other, as a means for hindering far-reaching social and political reforms. “Renascent natural law” is undergoing a strong influence from clericalism; it is also imparting a pragmatic character to the concept of natural law (for example, natural law “with changing content” or “natural law of a concrete situation”).
The Marxist materialist approach to law as a reflection of the economic order and political structure of class society makes superfluous the concept of natural law as a precondition for the existence and validity of existing law. In society there may be only one system of law, which is established by the state. And in its law-making activities the state is bound by the principles of a given social system, which are determined not by the “nature of man” but by the socioeconomic order and the means of production. At the same time Marxism does not consider false everything that stands behind the concept of natural law. Marxism attaches great significance to the inalienable rights of man and citizen and, in evaluating existing law, assigns an important role to ideals and values (and justice as well), considering them, however, socially conditioned, class-bound, and historically changing, not a priori categories.
V. A. TUMANOV