or the recourse to a religious order of law, can alleviate the congenital logical weaknesses of natural law. It only postpones the inevitable.40 However, while the positivist sees the aloof character of natural law as a sign of its practical and scientific invalidity, the natural theoretician sees natural law’s transcendence, its practical and legal indifference and quietism as a factor that regardless of cognitive accessibility, guarantees its absolute scientific impartiality, immutability, and permanence. (See, e.g., PartVII, Chapter 1.) Hägerström continued that: undaunted by its inherent antinomies and aporia, natural law theory continued to build its authority to prescribe law, especially to legislators, on its ability to derive the intrinsically just law from the law of nature. During the 18th Century the preferred method was the so-called mathematical method (cf. mos geometricus, see PartVII, Chapter 1.1.3), according to which the natural lawyers could from a given axiom deduce logically, without regard to natural science or historical knowledge, how society necessarily ought to be organized (in order to correspond to what was right per se).41 In essence, the abstract dogmas of historical religion, ethics, law, and philosophy were elevated to the status of legal axioms,42 in which capacity they served as the non-historical, universal, and irrefutable premisses to the deductive production of normative ideals for positive law. For instance, the ideas of the French Revolution (1789), the advancement of human rights such as freedom and equality, were ideas that political and legal philosophers claimed to have derived from the very essence of man, his inner being, whereupon positive law was bound to respect such rights on account of their intrinsic validity and truth value.43 Hägerström’s comparison between Lasalle and Marx reveals his liking for Marx,44 but what is more interesting in this context is p a r t v, c h a p t e r 1 304 40 Ibid., p. 182. 41 Ibid., p. 117. 42 Ibid., pp. 63-64, 117-119, and 148-149. 43 Ibid., pp. 136-142 (Rosseau), and 143-161 (Robespierre and Babeuf). 44 For Hägerström’s appreciation of Marx see also Hägerström, “Marx och filosofin.
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