Natural Law

natural law, theory that some laws are basic and fundamental to human nature and are discoverable by human reason without reference to specific legislative enactments or judicial decisions. Natural law is opposed to positive law, which is human-made, conditioned by history, and subject to continuous change. The concept of natural law originated with the Greeks and received its most important formulation in Stoicism. The Stoics believed that the fundamental moral principles that underlie all the legal systems of different nations were reducible to the dictates of natural law. This idea became particularly important in Roman legal theory, which eventually came to recognize a common code regulating the conduct of all peoples and existing alongside the individual codes of specific places and times (see natural rights). Christian philosophers such as St. Thomas Aquinas perpetuated this idea, asserting that natural law was common to all peoples—Christian and non-Christian alike—while adding that revealed law gave Christians an additional guide for their actions. In modern times, the theory of natural law became the chief basis for the development by Hugo Grotius of the theory of international law. In the 17th cent., such philosophers as Spinoza and G. W. von Leibniz interpreted natural law as the basis of ethics and morality; in the 18th cent. the teachings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, especially as interpreted during the French Revolution, made natural law a basis for democratic and egalitarian principles. The influence of natural law theory declined greatly in the 19th cent. under the impact of positivism, empiricism, and materialism. In the 20th cent., such thinkers as Jacques Maritain saw in natural law a necessary intellectual opposition to totalitarian theories.

Bibliography

See J. Maritain, The Rights of Man and Natural Law (1943, repr. 1971); J. Fuchs, Natural Law (1965); J. Stone, Human Law and Human Justice (1965); A. Battaglia, Toward a Reformulation of Natural Law (1981).

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natural law

In jurisprudence and political philosophy, a system of right or justice common to all humankind and derived from nature rather than from the rules of society, or positive law. The concept can be traced to Aristotle, who held that what was “just by nature” was not always the same as what was “just by law.” In one form or another, the existence of natural law was asserted by the Stoics (see Stoicism), Cicero, the Roman jurists, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Gratian, St. Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and Francisco Suárez. In the modern period, Hugo Grotius insisted on the validity of natural law even on the assumption that God does not exist, and Thomas Hobbes defined a law of nature as “a precept of general rule found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life.” Hobbes attempted to construct an edifice of law by rational deduction from a hypothetical “state of nature” and a social contract of consent between rulers and subjects. John Locke departed from Hobbes in describing the state of nature as an early society in which free and equal men observe the natural law. Jean-Jacques Rousseau postulated a savage who was virtuous in isolation and actuated by two principles “prior to reason”: self-preservation and compassion. The authors of the U.S. Declaration of Independence refer only briefly to “the Laws of Nature” before citing equality and other “unalienable” rights as “self-evident.” The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen asserts liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression as “imprescriptible natural rights.” Interest in the concept of natural law declined dramatically in the 19th century, partly as a result of skeptical attacks by Jeremy Bentham and other proponents of utilitarianism; it was revived in the mid-20th century in light of the crimes committed by the Nazi regime during World War II. Skepticism of natural law and natural rights remained strong, however, and later writers almost invariably talked of human rights rather than natural rights.

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Natural Law 

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.

REFERENCE

Istoriia politicheskikh uchenii, 2nd ed. Moscow, 1960. Pages 213–15,
236–49, 269–327.

V. A. TUMANOV