any objections that natural law is politics in the guise of law, elevates the politics of the philosophical discourse of political rights to the status of the inalienable and irrefutable law of nature. Nevertheless, to Hägerström and for Marxism, the future was bright, for it was understood that the development of sociology, as well as other social and political sciences, continually undermined the authority of natural law.This process was further facilitated by the restricted practicality of natural law, which was caused by the transcendent nature of natural law theory itself, and by natural law’s aspirations for absoluteness and universal validity - aspirations that theoretically precluded natural law from adjusting its principles in a relative direction (a process that according to natural law theory posed a danger as it would restrict the reach and validity of natural law to that which it could prove positively).51 It is especially with regard to the manifest tendency of natural law to disregard central aspects of society and human life in favor of philosophical perfection that these aspirations made themselves manifest.52 In more modern times, especially during the 19th Century, legal metaphysics, by means of its theory of state and public law, came to serve a decidedly conservative function helping to provide the powers that be with added legitimacy.53 (Here Hägerström probably refers to Swedish idealism, the philosophy of Christopher Jacob Boström, which served a decidedly political function in 19th Century intellectual life as Boström’s philosophy came to serve as a bulwark in defense of the Diet of Four estates and the Swedish form of government abandoned in 1865-1866): p a r t v, c h a p t e r 1 306 51 Hägerström, De socialistiska idéernas historia, pp. 181 and 258-259. 52 Ibid., p. 181. 53 See ibid., p. 30. For a general description of Boström’s ideology see, e.g., Nordin, Boströmska skolan, pp. 200-207. See also Part II, Chapter 1.1.1. “Metaphysics, in combination with a study of law determined by it, constitutes the ideological basis of modern constitutionalism, with its twisted understanding of the monarch as being the possessor of the power of the state, but whose powers are restricted by Parliament. How-
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