Galtland Index

Natural Law and Natural Order

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Natural Law and Natural Order

Natural law is the claim that there is an objective standard of right — discoverable by human reason and binding on everyone prior to and independent of any government’s command — against which the merely posited law of states can be measured and judged. “Natural order” is the cognate idea that a just social order can arise and sustain itself from those natural rights without a sovereign legislator. Together they are the deepest root of the natural-rights branch of the libertarian tradition.

Two Connected Ideas

Natural law is a thesis about justice and obligation: some norms are not invented but found — true everywhere, not contingent on what people happen to think. On this view positive (enacted) law derives whatever genuine authority it has from its conformity to the natural law, and an enactment that violates it is defective as law, however formally valid.

Natural order is a thesis about social organization: if rights are natural rather than granted, then the institutions that protect them — property, contract, exchange, adjudication — need not be created by a state and can be understood as a spontaneous order. This is the sense Hoppe gives “natural order” in Democracy: The God That Failed: a private-law society ordered by property and contract rather than by monopoly command. The first idea supplies the standard; the second draws the anti-statist conclusion.

The Lineage

The libertarian use of natural law is the endpoint of a long argument. This wiki now holds the classical primary sources for each stage.

Aristotle — natural justice. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Book V distinguishes natural from conventional justice: the natural is “that which has everywhere the same force and does not depend upon being received or not”, while the conventional “originally may be this way or that indifferently” until fixed by enactment. The Politics supplies the teleological frame — man is by nature a political animal and the polis exists “by nature” for the good life — though Aristotle’s own application (the doctrine of natural slavery) is one libertarians reject.

Cicero — right reason. The Stoic-Roman synthesis in De Re Publica gives the tradition its most quoted formula. Book III: “true law is right reason in agreement with nature, diffused among all, constant and eternal” — a law that “Neither the people or the senate can absolve us from it”, the same at Rome as at Athens, framed and proclaimed by “God, the sole Ruler, and universal Lord”. Cicero transmits natural law from Greek philosophy into the vocabulary of law and rights. His companion dialogue De Legibus supplies the developed argument — that law is “nothing else than right reason, enjoining what is good and forbidding what is evil”, and that “law and equity are not a mere establishment of opinion, but an institution of nature.”

Aquinas — the fourfold scheme. The Treatise on Law (Summa I-II, QQ. 90–108) gives the most systematic medieval statement. Law is “an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated.” Aquinas distinguishes eternal law (God’s governance of creation), natural law (the rational creature’s participation in it, whose first precept is “good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided”), human law (positive enactments derived from natural law), and divine law (revelation). Crucially, a human law that conflicts with natural law “is no longer a law but a perversion of law.”

Grotius — secularization. The Rights of War and Peace (1625) detaches natural law from theology enough to ground a law of nations. Grotius defines it at the outset — “Natural right is the dictate of right reason” — showing the moral necessity or turpitude of an act by its agreement or disagreement with rational nature itself. So grounded in man’s rational and social nature, natural law would, in the famous formula of the Prolegomena, retain its force etiamsi daremus non esse Deum — even were we to grant that there is no God, or that he takes no care of human affairs. This makes natural law a basis for obligation among states and persons that does not depend on shared religion.

Pufendorf — sociality. The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature (1673) is the systematizer between Grotius and Locke. Pufendorf grounds the interpersonal law of nature in one principle of human sociality — in Tooke’s English, “every man ought, as much as in him lies, to preserve and promote society” — derived from man’s neediness and his capacity to harm, and deduces the duties men owe one another from it (the duties toward God and self, he is careful to add, rest on their own foundations). This roots natural law in man’s social nature rather than in contested metaphysics, and it is the deductive apparatus Locke read.

The School of Salamanca — the scholastic bridge. Between Aquinas and Locke stand the sixteenth-century Spanish scholastics mapped in School of Salamanca. Vitoria carried Thomist natural law into the law of nations, while Suárez and Mariana developed consent and resistance theory — Suárez held that political power “by natural and divine law devolves solely on the people,” and Mariana argued that subjects transferring power “from a state of nature to the king” reserved rights to themselves — anticipating Locke by decades. The same school, in Rothbard’s reading, were also proto-Austrian economists, tying natural law to subjective value and sound money.

Locke — natural rights. The Second Treatise of Government (1689) is the hinge between natural law and modern liberty. The state of nature “has a law of nature to govern it… and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind… that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions”. Property arises pre-politically: “every man has a property in his own person”, and by mixing his labour with the world he makes things his own. Government exists by consent to protect these rights, and forfeits its authority when it invades them — the right of revolution.

The political application — the Declaration and Paine. The tradition becomes practice in 1776. The Declaration of Independence states the Lockean syllogism as self-evident: that all men are created equal and endowed with “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and that the people may “alter or to abolish” a government that becomes “destructive of these ends”. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–92) carries the same premises into mass democratic politics against Burke, insisting that rights inhere in the living and that “every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it.”

Spooner — the radical conclusion. Natural Law; or The Science of Justice (1882) pushes the tradition to its individualist-anarchist edge. Justice is “the science of mine and thine… of all a man’s rights of person and property” — an exact, immutable natural science. From this Spooner concludes that “all human legislation” beyond the enforcement of natural justice is “an intrusion, an absurdity, an usurpation, and a crime.”

Rothbard and Hoppe — the modern heirs. The wiki’s existing natural-rights core descends directly from this line. Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty opens with a Part titled “Natural Law” and rebuilds self-ownership and property as natural rights; Nonaggression and Property Rights is the compressed statement. Hoppe converts the same property theory into the “natural order” of a stateless private-law society.

How Libertarianism Uses It — and Where It Splits

Natural law gives libertarianism a way to call the state unjust rather than merely inefficient: taxation and conscription are wrong because they violate rights that exist prior to the state, not because they fail a cost-benefit test. This is the natural-rights branch (Locke → Spooner → Rothbard → Hoppe).

It is not the only branch. The wiki’s Mises deliberately rejected natural rights and defended liberty on consequentialist, utilitarian grounds — peace and prosperity, not natural justice. The two routes reach overlapping conclusions by incompatible methods, a tension visible across the corpus (see Nonaggression and Property Rights, which lays out the natural-rights, argumentation, and consequentialist defenses side by side). Bastiat’s The Law is the bridge: a popular nineteenth-century statement that law exists to defend pre-existing natural rights to person, liberty, and property, and becomes “legal plunder” when it does the opposite.

Critiques

The tradition is contested. Hume’s is/ought gap challenges any inference from what is natural to what ought to be done. Legal positivism (Bentham, who derided natural rights as nonsense; Austin, for whom “law” just means the sovereign’s command; later Kelsen and Hart) holds that law and morality are separate, denying Aquinas’s claim that an unjust law is no law. (Hart refined the tradition — replacing Austin’s command-of-the-sovereign model with a “rule of recognition” — while keeping the separation of law and morals.) Within the libertarian camp, Mises and the consequentialists regard natural-rights talk as unscientific, while Hoppe tries to escape the is/ought problem altogether by replacing natural-rights intuition with argumentation ethics (a transcendental, not natural-law, argument). The natural-law claim is therefore best read as one powerful foundation for libertarian conclusions, not the only one or an uncontested one.

See Also

  • Second Treatise of Government - Locke’s keystone natural-rights text
  • De Re Publica - Cicero’s “right reason in agreement with nature”
  • Nicomachean Ethics - Aristotle on natural vs. conventional justice
  • Politics - Aristotle’s natural teleology of the polis
  • Treatise on Law - Aquinas’s eternal/natural/human/divine scheme
  • The Rights of War and Peace - Grotius’s secularized natural law
  • Natural Law; or The Science of Justice - Spooner’s individualist-anarchist radicalization
  • Nonaggression and Property Rights - the modern compressed statement of the natural-rights core
  • The Ethics of Liberty - Rothbard’s natural-law libertarianism, the lineage’s terminus
  • The Law - Bastiat’s natural-rights case against legal plunder
  • Hans-Hermann Hoppe - “natural order” as stateless private-law society
  • Libertarianism - the doctrine this tradition grounds
  • De Legibus - Cicero’s systematic natural-law argument (On the Laws)
  • School of Salamanca - the scholastic bridge from Aquinas to Locke; natural law + proto-Austrian economics
  • Economic Thought Before Adam Smith - Rothbard’s history tying natural law to the origins of economics
  • The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature - Pufendorf’s sociality-based systematization between Grotius and Locke
  • Sociality - Pufendorf’s fundamental law of nature, the wiki’s concept page for the principle
  • The Declaration of Independence - the natural-rights tradition as founding political creed
  • Rights of Man - Paine’s revolutionary radicalization of natural rights
  • Voluntary Slavery, Debt, and the Title-Transfer Theory of Contract - On the title-transfer theory of contract, a clause enslaving you is void because the will is inalienable — but a debt is a transferred title to money, so non-payment is theft
  • Thomas Aquinas - Short author reference for Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274), the Dominican theologian whose Treatise on Law in the Summa Theologica is the most systematic medieval statement of natural law
  • Hugo Grotius - Short author reference for Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), the Dutch jurist whose De Jure Belli ac Pacis secularized natural law and founded modern international law
  • John Locke - Short author reference for John Locke (1632–1704), the English philosopher whose Second Treatise of Government gave the natural-rights tradition its decisive modern form
  • Thomas Paine - Short author reference for Thomas Paine (1737–1809), the Anglo-American revolutionary pamphleteer whose Common Sense helped spark the American Revolution and whose Rights of Man carried
  • Argumentation Ethics - Hoppe’s a priori argument that anyone who argues at all has already presupposed self-ownership and the non-aggression principle, so that denying them is self-refuting.
  • Homesteading - The libertarian theory of how unowned things first become property: by being put to use — Locke’s labor-mixing, Rothbard’s first-use-first-own.
  • Self-Ownership - The libertarian first principle: each person is the full owner of his own body and, therefore, of his labor and its products — the axiom from which the whole structure of property rights is derived.
  • Natural Law - The wiki’s natural-law hub: the classical lineage of reason-knowable justice above positive law, from Aristotle and Cicero through Aquinas, Grotius, Locke

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