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Author: Friedrich Julius Stahl Publisher: WordBridge Publishing ISBN: Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
Our age is characterized by radical subjectivism. Which is to say: There is no agreement on any absolute standard of value. Indeed, there is no agreement even on truth itself. And as a matter of fact, the very concept of objective, absolute truth has been cast aside in favor of “truths” – your truth, my truth, whoever’s truth. The result is the abandonment of the pursuit of truth at all, in favor of convictions, emotional appeals in favor of those convictions, and the pursuit of political power to put those convictions in practice. This state of affairs will come as no surprise to those, like Friedrich Julius Stahl, who track the way people think, who know that ideas have consequences and that thought eventually feeds into practice. This is especially the case with legal philosophy. Here is where theory and practice confront each other, where the rubber meets the road. And the history of legal philosophy is the history of ideas having consequences. This history can tell us a great deal about how we arrived at the current state of affairs. When we look at it, we find that the key player in this history is natural law. Once the mainstay of ethical and legal discourse, it is now a forgotten relic. But natural law paved the way for the triumph of subjectivism in the modern world. A strange thing, considering that natural law was supposed to embody an objective standard for judging man-made law. It ended up eliminating that standard. How this came about is the burden of The Rise and Fall of Natural Law. Natural law was born of the Greeks and Romans, adopted by the Christian church, and converted into the bulwark of Christian ethical and legal science. But along the way it became disengaged from the church; and when it did, it played a central role in secularizing Western civilization. Stahl follows this career, from its start in classical antiquity, through to its incorporation in the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, to its secularized versions in the Enlightenment, and culminating in the philosophy of Rousseau and the hard reality of the French Revolution. The subjectivist turn is especially emphasized in the work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose focus on enthusiastic conviction and the primacy of the subject makes him the prophet of the modern world. Although Fichte wrote at the turn of the 19th century, it is in our day that his orientation has triumphed. His story, and the stories of those leading up to him – the leading characters in “the Rise and Fall of Natural Law” – are crucial to understanding the genesis of the modern world.
Author: Friedrich Julius Stahl Publisher: WordBridge Publishing ISBN: Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
Our age is characterized by radical subjectivism. Which is to say: There is no agreement on any absolute standard of value. Indeed, there is no agreement even on truth itself. And as a matter of fact, the very concept of objective, absolute truth has been cast aside in favor of “truths” – your truth, my truth, whoever’s truth. The result is the abandonment of the pursuit of truth at all, in favor of convictions, emotional appeals in favor of those convictions, and the pursuit of political power to put those convictions in practice. This state of affairs will come as no surprise to those, like Friedrich Julius Stahl, who track the way people think, who know that ideas have consequences and that thought eventually feeds into practice. This is especially the case with legal philosophy. Here is where theory and practice confront each other, where the rubber meets the road. And the history of legal philosophy is the history of ideas having consequences. This history can tell us a great deal about how we arrived at the current state of affairs. When we look at it, we find that the key player in this history is natural law. Once the mainstay of ethical and legal discourse, it is now a forgotten relic. But natural law paved the way for the triumph of subjectivism in the modern world. A strange thing, considering that natural law was supposed to embody an objective standard for judging man-made law. It ended up eliminating that standard. How this came about is the burden of The Rise and Fall of Natural Law. Natural law was born of the Greeks and Romans, adopted by the Christian church, and converted into the bulwark of Christian ethical and legal science. But along the way it became disengaged from the church; and when it did, it played a central role in secularizing Western civilization. Stahl follows this career, from its start in classical antiquity, through to its incorporation in the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, to its secularized versions in the Enlightenment, and culminating in the philosophy of Rousseau and the hard reality of the French Revolution. The subjectivist turn is especially emphasized in the work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose focus on enthusiastic conviction and the primacy of the subject makes him the prophet of the modern world. Although Fichte wrote at the turn of the 19th century, it is in our day that his orientation has triumphed. His story, and the stories of those leading up to him – the leading characters in “the Rise and Fall of Natural Law” – are crucial to understanding the genesis of the modern world.
Author: Stuart Banner Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0197556493 Category : Common law Languages : en Pages : 265
Book Description
The law of nature -- The common law -- The adoption of written constitutions -- The separation of law and religion -- The explosion in law publishing -- The two-sidedness of natural law -- The decline of natural law and custom --Substitutes for natural law -- Echoes of natural law.
Author: Stuart Banner Publisher: ISBN: 9780197556528 Category : Common law Languages : en Pages : 255
Book Description
"Before the late 19th century, natural law played an important role in the American legal system. Lawyers routinely used it in their arguments and judges often relied upon it in their opinions. Today, by contrast, natural law plays virtually no role in the legal system. When natural law was part of a lawyer's toolkit, lawyers thought of judges as finders of the law, but when natural law dropped out of the legal system, lawyers began thinking of judges as makers of the law instead. The Decline of Natural Law explores the causes and consequences of this change. It discusses the ways in which lawyers used natural law and why the concept seemed reasonable to them. It examines several long-term trends in legal thought that weakened the position of natural law, including the use of written constitutions, the gradual separation of the spheres of law and religion, the rapid growth of legal publishing, and the position of natural law in some of the 19th century's most contested legal issues. It describes the profession's rejection of natural law in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And it explores the ways in which the legal system responded to the absence of natural law"--
Author: Heinrich Albert Rommen Publisher: ISBN: 9780865971615 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Originally published in German in 1936, The Natural Law is the first work to clarify the differences between traditional natural law as represented in the writings of Cicero, Aquinas, and Hooker and the revolutionary doctrines of natural rights espoused by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Beginning with the legacies of Greek and Roman life and thought, Rommen traces the natural law tradition to its displacement by legal positivism and concludes with what the author calls "the reappearance" of natural law thought in more recent times. In seven chapters each Rommen explores "The History of the Idea of Natural Law" and "The Philosophy and Content of the Natural Law." In his introduction, Russell Hittinger places Rommen's work in the context of contemporary debate on the relevance of natural law to philosophical inquiry and constitutional interpretation. Heinrich Rommen (1897–1967) taught in Germany and England before concluding his distinguished scholarly career at Georgetown University. Russell Hittinger is William K. Warren Professor of Catholic Studies and Research Professor of Law at the University of Tulsa.
Author: Mark H. Waddicor Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media ISBN: 9401032386 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 226
Book Description
In the last hundred years, the philosophy of natural law has suffered a fate that could hardly have been envisaged by the seventeenth and eighteenth century exponents of its universality and eternity: it has become old-fashioned. The positivists and the Marxists were happy to throw eternal moral ity out of the window, confident that some magic temporal harmony would eventually follow Progress in by the front door. Their hopes may not have been fully realized, but they did succeed in discrediting natural law. What is often not appreciated is the extent to which we have adopted the tenets of the philosophy they despised, borh in the field of politics, and in the field of personal and social ethics, which Barbeyrac called "la science des mreurs" and which the positivists re christened "social science". Consequently, though we live in a world whose freedom, such as it is, is largely a result of the popularization of the philosophy of natural law, and whose conscious and unconscious standards, such as they are, are a result of that philosophy as it became combined with Christianity, the doctrine of natural law is itself for gotten. In view of the oblivion into which it has fallen, natural law is a concept which means little to the average reader. All too often, Montesquieu scholars have traded on this oblivion in order to give an exaggerated picture of his originality.
Author: Pauline C. Westerman Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004247386 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 327
Book Description
John Finnis's proposal to rehabilitate Aquinas's natural law theory as an appropriate foundation of legal and moral theory rests on the assumption that Aquinas's theory can be restored by eliminating the mistaken interpretations of subsequent natural law theorists. This book challenges that assumption. After a brief analysis of Aquinas, the theories of Suárez, Grotius, and Pufendorf are investigated. It is argued that their theories are no 'mistakes', but attempts at solving problems inherent in natural law theory. As these attempts all fail, tensions remain, and ultimately lead to the demise of the theory. Finally it is argued that Finnis, running into the same problems, cannot hope to restore Aquinas's theoretical edifice.
Author: Howard P. Kainz Publisher: Open Court Publishing ISBN: 9780812694543 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 172
Book Description
Is there such a thing as an objective law of morality? Natural law theorists maintain that there is, and Natural Law probes the history and implications of this powerful concept. Tracing the development of natural law from ancient times to the present, the book also examines the leading figures, transitions, and turning points in the idea's evolution, and brings a natural law approach to contemporary issues such as abortion, homosexuality, and assisted suicide.
Author: Wilfrid J. Waluchow Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand ISBN: 9780198258124 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
This book develops a general theory of law, inclusive legal positivism, which seeks to remain within the tradition represented by authors such as Austin, Hart, MacCormick, and Raz, while sharing some of the virtues of both classical and modern theories of natural law, as represented by authors such as Aquinas, Fuller, Finnis, and Dworkin. Its central theoretical questions are: Does the existence or content of positive law ever depend on moral considerations? If so, is this fact consistent with legal positivism? The author shows how inclusive positivism allows one to answer yes to both of these questions. In addition to articulating and defending his own version of legal positivism, which is a refinement and development of the views of H.L.A. Hart as expressed in his classic book The Concept of Law, the author clarifies the terms of current jurisprudential debates about the nature of law. These debates are often clouded by failures to appreciate that different theorists are offering differing kinds of theories and attempting to answer different questions. There is also a failure, principally on the part of Ronald Dworkin, to characterize opposing theories correctly. The clarity of Waluchow's work will help to remove the confusion which has hitherto marred some jurisprudential debate, particularly about Dworkin's work.
Author: Friedrich Julius Stahl Publisher: WordBridge Publishing ISBN: Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 223
Book Description
As the world reels from crisis to crisis, the most serious one seems to draw the least attention. And that is the crisis of the Western mind. The seeds of radical subjectivism sown at the time of a previous such crisis, chronicled in Paul Hazard’s Crisis of the European Mind, have now borne fruit, fruit of such stupendous magnitude that they threaten to drag us down into the depths of cultural despair. In The Rise and Fall of Natural Law, this descent into the maelstrom was chronicled from its origin to its inevitable conclusion – at least, in the world of intellect. Culture lags intellect, but it is never insulated from it. Ideas do have consequences. The intellectual counterpart to our cultural crisis already played itself out 200 years ago. The crisis of the European mind, by which intellectual culture shifted from Revelation to Reason, found its fitting conclusion in the work of the ultimate solipsist, Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Fichte’s focus on enthusiastic conviction and the primacy of the subjective makes him the prophet of the modern world. Indeed, his orientation has now triumphed for all to see. His story, and the stories of those leading up to him – the leading characters in “the Rise and Fall of Natural Law” – are crucial to understanding the genesis of the modern world. But that is not the end of the story, for history goes on. That spot, precisely where the first half of Stahl’s history of legal philosophy leaves off, is where the second half picks up. The Recovery of Historical Law narrates the attempts to overcome this radical subjectivism and establish a functioning social order in which the ideal matches up with the real, the theory is in harmony with the practice. After discussing the work of Locke, Montesquieu, Constant, and the Doctrinaires, all of whom functioned fully within the framework of autonomous natural law while attempting to mitigate it, Stahl reveals the hero of the story: Friedrich Schelling. It was Schelling who initiated the gargantuan task of reorienting philosophy away from subjectivism and back toward objective reality. Stahl characterizes this as a “Samsonesque act” whereby Schelling “lifted the temple of the previous philosophy off of its pillars and buried the whole army of enemies, himself included, under its ruins.” For one thing, this explains the cover illustration, “Samson Destroying the Philistine Temple.” For another, it intimates how Schelling, like Moses, stood at the entry to the Promised Land without entering in. Schelling’s philosophy is an exercise in pantheism, an orientation from which he struggled to free himself later in life. And in fact, Hegel, his great fellow laborer in so-called “speculative philosophy,” took that pantheism and turned it into a mighty system in its own right. A rabbit trail that carried many into another dead end, one with which we wrestle today: “conscious” or “woke” big government. But that is not the end of the story. Schelling’s first fruits were recovered by the Historical School of Jurisprudence, led by Friedrich Carl von Savigny. Here the work of Counter-Revolutionaries such as Joseph de Maistre and Edmund Burke was carried forward to bear fruit for jurisprudence. And this is the foundation for Stahl’s own system, as contained in Volume II: The Doctrine of Law and State on the Basis of the Christian World-View. It is on this basis that the laborious task to reconstruct Western civilization can begin. And not a moment too soon.
Author: Friedrich Julius Stahl
Author: Friedrich Julius Stahl
Author: Stuart Banner
Author: Stuart Banner
Author: Heinrich Albert Rommen
Author: Mark H. Waddicor
Author: Pauline C. Westerman
Author: Howard P. Kainz
Author: Wilfrid J. Waluchow
Author: Friedrich Julius Stahl
Author: Hugh O'Donoghue