‘When accordingly it is inquired, whence is evil, it must first be inquired, what is evil, which is nothing else than corruption, either of the measure, or the form, or the order, that belong to nature.’ ~Augustine of Hippo
The study of Western Civilization has been all but eradicated. This was no accident but, rather, an aggressive policy of leftist academe which has used exclusionary tactics to dominate and pervert the culture and purpose of our universities since the 1960s and 70s.1 But, for us students, driven underground, Western history is the greatest treasure trove of almost every faculty. Not least of these is natural law.
This unique philosophy of law so encapsulated the spirit of the West that the late Surya P. Sinha described law as ‘the most central principle of [the] social organization’ of Western civilization alone. “This fact explains that most…theories about law have issued from the Western culture’.2 Sinha even declared law itself to be a non-universal phenomenon of the West, other civilizations developing little more than ‘principles of moral life which are not law.”3
The story of natural law is a fascinating one; Ricardo Duchesne draws from decades of definitive scholarship on the uniqueness of the West to crystallize the “essential message” from across the social sciences: “the rise of the West is the story of the realization of humans who think of themselves as self-determining and therefore accept as authoritative only those norms and institutions that can be seen to be congenial with their awareness of themselves as free and rational agents.”4 Being at the heart of Western civilization, yet lost to history and shrouded in confusion, I would like to clarify the environment in which natural law developed and the consequences of its loss.
This post was published at Ludwig von Mises Institute on Dec 29, 2017.
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