Introduction to the special issue on ‘Social Theory and Natural Law’

Abstract

Relations between social theory and natural law have not figured prominently in scholarly debates, and the case for their interconnections, which is far from self-evident, needs explicit justification. The aim of this special issue, which is to explore linkages between social theory and natural law, requires that we take a step back and redefine the ways in which these traditions are conventionally viewed. We see natural law as a heterogeneous intellectual tradition whose core lies in the question of universalism. We can differentiate between traditional and modern, conservative and radical, religious and secular forms of natural law, as well as between natural law and natural right; but in all cases the problem of universalism remains central. We see social theory as a modern intellectual programme that, over the past two hundred or so years, has sought to understand the rise and main features of a number of socio-historical trends that still very much configure the world in which we live: capitalism, democracy, the international system of states, and the differentiation of spheres of social life. The history of social theory’s relations to natural law builds on a distinction between the difficult but often intimate relation to natural law that social theory has actually experienced, and secondary reconstructions of social theory that read as if social theory has definitively moved beyond natural law and established in its place a scientific perspective. Our special issue confronts the latter view by explicitly addressing their interconnections. We should like to make explicit four related aspects of the relationship between these two traditions. First, natural law brings the normative into social theory based on some kind of contrast between actually existing society and an ideal society organized according to the laws of nature. Both traditions seek to understand the tensions between description and normativity. Second, social theory brings history into natural law by emphasizing human agency in the making of history and the changing circumstances under which human beings make history. It brings contingency into natural law by emphasizing that social life is not organized according to fixed laws of nature or history. An ideal society is neither the starting point nor the endpoint of history. Third, the idea of natural law only Editorial