apart, could hardly be more sharp. Natural law is seen, variously, as God’s will
for the world, moral principles innate in the structure of the universe, the
principles of rational self-interest, or the necessary elements logically under-
lying any legal system. In the last of these senses, especially, it is contrasted with
positive law, those laws actually promulgated by the state.
Natural law began to become really important when the EuropeanEnlight-
enment, with its faith in the capacity of human reason to solve social
problems, and its debunking of the right of the church to teach by authority
of its special connection to God’s will, simultaneously challenged the legiti-
macy of both secular and temporal powers. The very thinkers who did this
needed some basis for their own views on right and wrong; for them moral
intuition was seen as not rational enough, reliance on positive law was useless as
they were, on the whole, opposed to most of the political authorities, and
something had to take the place of these traditional sources of authority. Partly
by analogy to what we would today call ‘the laws of nature’ in their scientific
sense, natural law in politics and morals was seen as fixed in the universe by its
very principles, and amenable to discovery by rational thought and analysis.
Just as there could only be one physical law determining, for example, the rate
of fall of an object from a tower, there could only be one correct way of
organizing a political system, or of acting in a case of moral doubt. To believe
anything else would be to accept a randomness about the universe which, in
the days long before relativistic and probabilistic models in the physical
sciences, was unthinkable. However, what these natural laws that governed
political society—which should give answers to all the stock questions of
political theory, determine the grounds of political obligation, the balance of
power between the state and the individual and so on—actually were was
rather harder to discover.
The natural law tradition in political theory was not, perhaps, all that long-
lived before it fell victim, in English political thinking anyway, to attacks by
sceptics like DavidHume, and the philosophical radicals like JeremyBen-
tham. Their inability to discover a foundation for natural law led them to
resort to human psychological drives as the foundation of political principles,
culminating in theutilitarianismso pervasive today. The tradition never
completely died out, even in England, and, often under other names, con-
tinues to have some importance. In law it has never been possible to operate
only by positive law, and, though they seldom use the language, leading jurists
and judges in both America and Britain have to fall back at times on some
conception ofnatural rightsto fill gaps and handle problems of discretion, as
with the English legal doctrine ofnatural justice. In continental Europe the
continued importance of the philosophical tradition ofKantandHegelhas
kept the idea alive more obviously, but in a rather changed state. The
alternative home of natural law thinking in contemporary society is that of
Natural Law