Abstract
I think it has not yet become entirely banal, though it is certainly starting to seem awfully familiar, to claim that there is some kind of causal or at least instrumental relation between the development of biology, medicine and statistics since the nineteenth century, with their attendant sociological concepts of Man and the population, and the emergence of the idea of positive law and forms of government that appear to be nothing more than its scienti c and statistically-oriented application. Thanks to science, we are now in a good position to see the increasing tendency of positive law and natural law to converge; such that positive law (as practice) seems to have become functionally responsible for the disclosure of natural law. Indeed, we have observed that the most basic axiom for the theorist of positive law, that “law is a thing of man,” is becoming ever more attenuated. Because the notion of a relation between science and positive law has become so familiar, the notion of the convergence of positive and natural law (as ideas) may give the impression of espousing a kind of teleology, or at least a theory of some open-ended variety of progress. Such a claim is beyond the scope of this essay. Focusing on the rhetoric surrounding the issue of human reproductive and therapeutic cloning (for no reason other than that the promise of these technologies provides an adequate occasion), this essay will serve as a preliminary framework for study of the developing amalgamation of ideas and forces that has been characterized at one time as positive law, at another as government, at another as religion, and at another as science, which at the present moment collaborate to offer a challenge to the conventional sociology and to the conventional de nitions of law, via a strange promise for the real transformation of human life and concomitant de nitions of the living. This essay will tell the story of a sort of
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