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Natural Law Forum

1-1-1960

Democracy and Natural Law

Robert L. Calhoun

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Calhoun, Robert L., "Democracy and Natural Law" (1960). Natural Law Forum. Paper 48.
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 DEMOCRACY AND
NATURAL LAW*

Robert L. Calhoun

THE THEME I WANT TO TALK ABOUT is Democracy and the law of nature. I
shall be talking in bold terms, defending the thesis that rational defense of
democracy appears to me to require as postulate some doctrine of natural
law. Natural law is, of course, not a segment of positive law, nor a body of
propositions from which positive law can be simply derived. It is to be con-
ceived rather, I suggest, as context and presupposition for positive law. At
the same time it is truly law, at once fact and norm, entailing both necessity
and obligation. I shall conceive it as presupposition peculiarly for democratic
political order as contrasted with all sorts of despotism and totalitarianism.

I. THE UPS AND DOWNS OF POLITICAL DEMOCRACY

FIRST I WANT TO TALK ABOUT the ups and downs of political democracy,
beginning with truisms so obvious that they will be dull, and moving on
gradually toward more venturesome comments which may still be dull, but
I hope will not be quite so obvious. First of all, my intent here is not his-
torical narration, an account of the way democracies have come into being
and have passed away, but rather an attempt at analysis of principles In-
volved in the precarious existence of democracy, with some historical illustra-
tions by the way. And I shall take it for granted that democracy has a
peculiar sort of dynamic that is charateristic of a mode of life that is neither
simply fact nor simply ideal, but rather an open-ended actuality, a state of
affairs that is real, imbedded in the world of existence, but that perpetually
looks toward the achievement of good that has not yet anywhere been
achieved, and that, presumably, will never be completely achieved. This
combination of actuality with openness into the realm of what might be,
what ought to be, may well be responsible in substantial measure for the
strange fascination of democracy to plain people. Dictators are well aware
of that fascination and try to curb it. It is a commonplace that the newly
freed peoples of Asia and of Africa reach first after this as their preferred
mode of political organization; and if they find it impracticable to continue

* This paper is based on a series of lectures delivered at the Notre Dame Law Scho,1l on
October 2 and 3, 1959.
 NATURAL LAW FORUM

on the line of their first preference, the preference has nevertheless made
itself manifest. Likewise, the curious habits of dictators who seek to maintain
barriers to communication between their own people and folk in other parts
of the world, where democracy is both preached and in some imperfect way
practiced, is further testimony to the same kind of fascination.
I suggest that we begin - and here come some of the truisms - by seeing
whether or not we are agreed concerning the nature of social institutions by
and large. To begin with, I shall mean by community a society which is
more or less unified by internal as well as by external factors. A society may
be given de facto unity by geographical limits, by ethnic kinship, or by other
relatively external controls. But if society is to be community its centripetal
tendencies must arise in part from the sharing of systems of communication,
the sharing of common memories and of common objectives, the possession
of common presuppositions, capacities for working and thinking in a com-
mon universe that includes not simply things and events open to physical
inspection, but also the intangible meanings and values among which a very
large share of our significant living must go on. Community is society, then,
which is held together in important part by such internal, dynamic factors.
An extensive community will presumably be made up not of isolated indi-
viduals, but of component groups, each of which itself may be a kind of
subcommunity - the family, the school, the business world, the church.
Each of these is in its own fashion internally unified, and each lives with its
neighbors in a pattern of overlapping subgroups.
Now I suggest that institutions are, in some fashion, understandable as
structures of social behavior which cut across these various component mem-
bers of an extensive community life. One may think of them perhaps - and
here I display my layman's naivet6 - as comparable to habit systems in the
life of an individual person, acquired behavior patterns that have a kind of
massive stability, that make for greater facility and precision and continuity
of behavior, and that resist change, as habit structures tend to do. If we
speak of the family as an institution, we are speaking, I suggest, of an agreed
and toughly resilient way of organizing and maintaining domestic life. If we
speak of the school as an institution, we are speaking of a habitual way of
bringing younger members of the community into full participation. If we
speak of the church as an institution, we are speaking of a massive, orderly
way of organizing our corporate acts of worship, our corporate interpreta-
tion of the life of the spirit, our ministry to members of the community and
the world outside. If this notion of institutions be somewhere nearly right,
they are then to be thought of as cutting across all the identifiable compo-
nents in the life of the community as a whole.
ROBERT L. CALHOUN

Among these cross-sectional structures is the State as institution defining

order by political initiative and control. In a complex society, with its diver-
sity of interest groups, there is need that somewhere there shall be centered
power to make and to enforce decisions respecting the common life. There
is need, moreover, if the use of that power is to be orderly and responsible
rather than capricious, that there be provided organized ways of making,
revising, and interpreting rules aimed at the common good. In a word,
there is need that the authority of the State shall be embodied in ordered
government.
Now, if we try to specify the character of a democratic political order, it
is important to distinguish at the outset between democracy as regulative
idea and democracy as operating system. Regulative idea (a term here bor-
rowed from Kant 1 ) means not an abstraction floating somewhere in the
vague distance, but an intellectually and emotionally effective goal toward
which, and partly under the guidance of which, actual life is carried on. I
suggest that to identify political democracy as regulative idea, one may
specify in the first place a distinctive correlation and balance of plurality and
unity with respect to initiative, and with respect to control. When we use
the term initiative with reference to government, we are using, perhaps
unwittingly, a Greek concept that has long been ingrained in certain of our
most familiar terms for different sorts of government. When we speak of
monarchy we are speaking of a government in which initiative, 'arch,, the
right to propose policy, to make the first move in seeking to guide social be-
havior, rests with one man. If we speak of oligarchy we are saying that
initiative rests with a few. Among the Greek clans of Homeric times, as I
understand the matter, arche' was regarded as the prerogative of the chief-
tain. 2 It was he who proposed a course of action. The clansmen could
discuss it, but eventually the chieftain made the decision. To speak of in-
itiative in this sense is to speak, therefore, of what from a very early time
has been regarded as of the essence of political activity. Now in a political
democracy, I suggest, initiative in this sense is not embodied in one person,
nor in a few, but rather plurality of initiative is encouraged, so that sugges-
tions for policy may come from any of the component groups. Ideally, these
will be weighed, and a decision reached, not in accordance with the status
or prestige of the one who first made the proposal, but in such fashion as to
take account of the diversities of interests involved.
Similarly control, without which plural initiative would, of course, be
anarchic, can rest in one ruler, or in a small group. But once again, in a
1. CRITIQuE oF PuRE REASON B384; cf. B222; B536 ff.; B671 ff.
2. Cf. J. L. MYmxs, THE POLITICAL IDEAS OF THE GREEKS 80-97 (1927).
 NATURAL LAW FORUM

democratic political order it is not so centered. Instead of leaving in the

hands of a single leader the right to determine the life of the entire group,
whether by coercive pressure or by appeal to personal loyalty, a democratic
political order centers control, at least theoretically and in large measure in
fact, in a growing system of law in which are accumulated the wisdom and
the unwisdom, the effort and aspiration, the hope and the insight of a long-
continuing series of generations of community life. The control that is ex-
erted, therefore, like the initiative that is encouraged, is in some sense
representative of the entire body, which is at once governing and being gov-
erned. Here, I. would suggest, is a first differentia of political democracy:
derivation of both initiative and control from the whole body politic.
A second is like it: reciprocity as between rulers and ruled. You remem-
ber the passages in which Aristotle is speaking of the true polis as compared
with the household, the citizen as distinguished from master or slave, the
"polity" of a middle-class society as distinct from monarchy, aristocracy, or
democracy. 3 In a true polis each of the citizens will rule and be ruled by
turns, so that each member of the group must learn both to command and to
obey; and, while he is subject to the rulers then in power, he will know
himself as one who is eligible to take the responsibilities now borne by one
of his neighbors. Such give-and-take, too familiar to need extended com-
ment, is a second essential feature of the democratic idea as regulative of
political life.
A third is seeking both appropriate distinction and adjustment of equal-
ity and inequality: equality in respect of basic personal existence; inequality
in the obvious factors of endowment and capacity and power. Democracy
needs adjustment and balance of such a sort that the ideal of equality will
not be permitted to turn into either a meaningless abstraction or an excuse
for the breakdown of social control. The caricature which Plato writes into
The Republic of a democratic society in which the servant maids claim
equality with their mistresses, in which the horses and donkeys elbow their
owners off the sidewalks because they profess to be equal in "freedom" to all
the rest 4 - this is, of course, not what is normally meant by democratic so-
ciety. The equality that seems to us indispensable is the common status of
persons as persons. To suppose that they are equal in respect of physical
strength or swiftness, wealth or wisdom, range of experience and resource-
fulness is to think in a way that is obviously contrary to fact. But somehow,
in the democratic order, the basic sameness of human existence and the
obvious diversity of human conditions are so adjusted that both equality and
3. PoLrrxcs II. 1261 a-b; III. 1277 a-b; IV. 1295 b, 1296 8; etc.
4. Rzpunmic VIII. 562d-563d.
ROBERT L. CALHOUN

diverse inequality may contribute to a common life more satisfying than a

life in which these factors were either ignored or permitted to be perma-
nently out of balance.
Next there is need to maintain flexibility and stability together: flexibil-
ity which will leave the way open for continuing change in the existing
patterns of political and social order; stability sufficient to insure that such
change is well considered and pertinent. A Third Reich, set up with the
boast that it would last unaltered for a thousand years, is the antithesis to
the democratic understanding that society is, by its very nature, perpetually
in flux, needing to be guided but never frozen.
Finally, democracy views authority as (I shrink a little from using a
word which sounds sentimental) creative control. Sometimes we think of
authority primarily in terms of coercion. Often we think of it primarily in
terms of prestige and emotional persuasion. But the initial meaning of the
word suggests something very different. It comes, of course, from a root that
means to enhance the one that is controlled. Augere means to make greater,
and auctor is one who exercises that sort of productive, beneficent, stimula-
tive control. Auctoritas, so understood, is concerned to prompt into fuller
life the folk over whom authority is being exercised -another hallmark of
the democratic idea.
Now if we turn from democracy as regulative idea to democracy as oper-
ating reality, we can recognize at least approximation to many of these
essential concerns. In the first place, in existing democratic societies the rules
for public behavior and for political control are established and modified in
the light of open discussion, and by decision that seeks to reflect majority
will, with concern alike for the common good and for voluntary assent.
Sometimes democracy seems to me to be defined a little too exclusively in
terms of majority rule. 5 That is surely one of the indispensable, recognizable
features of democracy in action, but it seems to me, only one. A second, not
a whit less important, is the provision of safeguards for dissenting minorities.
At this point I find myself differing a bit from Professor d'Entr&ves's choice
of Rousseau as "the supreme prophet and theorist of modern democracy,"
because I concur so heartily in his rejection of Rousseau's assignment of
final authority to an allegedly inerrant "general will," in his preference for
a doctrine of natural law that insists on "recognition of certain supreme
values" having other grounds than social approval, and in his summation:
"Only when the rights of man are secured can democracy be a true democ-

5. Aristotle shrewdly remarks that this is not really distinctive of democracy alone. POLI-
Tcs IV. iv. Sec. 1, 1290a; cf. V. ix. Sec. 14-15, 1310a.
 NATURAL LAW FORUM

racy."' Rousseau leaves out an essential ingredient: protection for the

dissenter, whether it be a subcommunity, an interest group that feels ag-
grieved by the decision of the majority, or a single, lonely individual who
insists that the decision taken publicly is a harmful decision. That a dissent-
ing minority or individual can properly claim the right to make decisions for
the whole society, or to disregard the decisions lawfully made on behalf of
the majority is, on the face of it, incompatible with the democratic way of
doing business. But to assure that the dissenter shall have security and free-
dom to urge what appear to him to be valid objections, and seek by per-
suasion to get political decisions altered is one vital function of public law,
to which government as well as private citizens is subject. The Constitution,
the Bill of Rights, provision for judicial interpretation of both private and
public law and for decisions that involve principles of equity, as well as free-
dom for political opposition and for campaigning and secret balloting,
provide various safeguards for the dissenter.
Thirdly, working democracy embodies an explicit and effective distinc-
tion between State and community. One of the earmarks of the totalitarian
understanding of society is that it seeks to make all subcommunities - fam-
ily, school, business, press, church- completely subject to control by the
State.7 The State then is not one vital institution among others: a policeman,
a referee, and a source of initiative for the common good. Instead, it seeks
to be Otoextensive with family and school, press, business community, and the
Church, so that all of these component interest, groups are, in principle, re-
duced to organs and agencies of the State. In a democratic political order,
this megatherian concept is expressly rejected as out of accord with the demo-
cratic understanding of social good, and with the actual make-up of the
human community. That the State is able to exercise total control over all
human interests is almost obviously contrary to fact. Whenever a govern-
ment has attempted that sort of control, whether it be the hard-pressed
ancient government of Diocletian or a modem totalitarian regime, the effort
has been patently unsuccessful. By contrast, political democracy frankly
recognizes and welcomes a basic distinction between State and community.
The State must, .of course, be strong enough to prevent dominance by any
private group. But on the other hand the democratic government recognizes

6. 1 NATURAL LAW FORUM 25; 26 (1956); cf. RousSEAU, Du CONTRAT SOCIAL I. vii;
II. iii-iv; IV. i (1762). Locke seems to me to fill better the role of "prophet and theorist
of modern democracy," not only through priority in time but through clearer recognition
of what is "true democracy." Cf. OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT II. iv. 21-22; xiii. 149; xiv. 168.
7. CL. R. M. MACIVER, LEVIATHAN AND THE PEOPLE (1939).
 ROBERT L. CALHOUN

that its proper task is to ensure a home for many subgroups in which each
may be able and encouraged to work at its own peculiar concerns so long as
it does not encroach on similar freedom for its neighbors.
Finally, there is a recognizable preference in democratic political life for
continual subordination of coercive to noncoercive modes of control. That
there must be somewhere an ultimate center from which coercion can be
applied as a last resort seems to be quite inescapable when we are dealing
with extensive and complex modern society. But conscious effort to avoid -
as far as the need for public order may permit - resort to overt coercion or
to the habitual threat embodied in Gestapo or MVD, marks the democratic
understanding and practice of political life.
One alternative mode of control is persuasion, the effort to present alter-
native modes of action in such wise that one will appear emotionally more
attractive than another. The possibility of misusing persuasion through con-
scienceless propaganda is obvious, but persuasion can be honest and salutary.
A Marshall Plan, a costly program of aid to underdeveloped countries, a
mandate for desegregation in public schools call for persuasive advocacy to
overcome every shortsightedness and misguided self-interest.
Even better than persuasion is instruction, spelling out not simply the
emotional attractiveness but the fundamental rightness of a course of action
which the government believes to be right. The need for popular under-
standing is the primary reason that democratic government must have an
educated constituency, accustomed to genuine instruction and able to profit
by it. However imperfectly that demand is being fulfilled in practice, the
principle is clear. Citizens of a democratic state should be enabled in sub-
stantial measure to understand, and so to become participants in, the debates
and decisions of their government. This is precisely to put into effect in one
crucial area the conception of authority as stimulative and creative rather
than as simply restrictive or compulsory - as control which enhances the life
of those who are controlled. That is an ideal which in sizable measure our
democratic societies do in fact practice.
But now what are we to say about the survival value of society of this
kind, the vitality of democracy in the actual world? This is a problem over
which many a wise inquirer has found himself puzzled to the point of near-
pessimism. The reasons for doubting the resilience of democracy in the
world we actually live in are, I presume, so familiar that they scarcely need
more than mention.
There is a general reason: Democracy in point of fact has occurred rare-
ly in the history of men - almost always in the Western world, and seldom
there. We think of the early years of the Hebrew people, perhaps, at a time
 NATURAL LAW FORUM

when the autonomy of the clan and the fierce individualism of the tribesmen
bore some of the marks of democratic society. That ,judgment is sound
enough, but such tribal life was scarcely political democracy in any sophisti-
cated sense. We think of Athens in the age of Pericles as a democracy - but
how short a life it had, and at the end how disappointing and self-destructive
a life. We think of Rome before the Republic had given place to the Empire
as in some sense a democratic society. But it gave place to the Empire, and
the Empire went down. And in the modern world how often has democracy
appeared and made good its claim? For a time we thought the record was
not only good, but steadily improving. Between 1640 and 1917 it looked
very much as if democracy had approved itself the wave of the future. It
was a new kind of democracy now - parliamentary democracy, if you will,
with a rising bourgeoisie as its main constituent. In Britain, in the newly
nascent United States, and in France, this way of life appeared to be the way
of progress. Then came World War I and its aftermath, and the closing in of
new sorts of repression on various peoples that had voluntarily chosen this
way. What are we to say? That democracy is a hothouse plant? That it
requires for its flourishing a set of conditions that are, at best, local and
transitory? Perhaps that is, on the face of it, a plausible conclusion.
Perhaps we can even specify some of those conditions. We can say
democracy is a luxurious way of life that depends, among other things, on
an expanding economy, and perhaps an expanding territory, a widening
frontier. That was true when Britain established herself as a democracy.
She had broken the power of Spain; she was soon to break the power of the
Netherlands; and she was to find an open horizon for her own life in a
widening territorial range. In this situation the democratic pattern of life,
for all its loose play and relative inefficiency, could flourish. But when the
frontier is dosed, when the economy is no longer moving into wider and
wider living spaces, what then? Our own democracy had the West into
which it could grow, a safety valve for accumulated social tension. Was that
open geographic frontier, perhaps, an indispensable condition for the health
and vitality of American democratic political life?
One can specify another condition: an optimistic ideology, especially
about man. The Eighteenth Century was a confident time. The Enlighten-
ment regarded man as primarily a rational person confronting a world in
which rational order is basic, to which man has a kind of congruence and
kinship. The early flush of Romanticism regarded man as fundamentally
noble in his emotional responses, and therefore to be trusted with freedom.
When the shadows of skepticism and of pessimism have supplanted that
bright-eyed appraisal of man, his nature and his destiny, what about democ-
ROBERT L. CALHOUN

racy then? Must not a realist say the requisite climate has changed, and
democracy is left without a permanent home?
I suggest that another reading of the familiar facts is at least feasible and
perhaps acceptable. Democracy does indeed require conditions that are
neither simple nor automatically supplied, but these conditions need not be
regarded as either transitory or to be achieved only in a single way.
First of all, it seems plain that democracy depends for its primary dynamic
not upon environing circumstances, but rather upon an impulse in man that
is deep-rooted, tough, and resilient. This impulse brought modem demo-
cratic political order into being in the teeth of an entrenched feudalism that
was dead set against the insurgence of the rising middle class. The dynamic
was supplied, not by the environment, but by the insistent effort of a vigorous
lot of men to get free for the achievement of values that appeared to them
worth living for, and when necessary, dying for. The primary impulse was
internal, not external.
But there was and is need for at least certain negative favoring condi-
tions. Two of the most obvious are freedom from want, of the personally
destructive kinds, and safeguards against fear. Freedom from want means
relief, in the first instance and most obviously, from economic privation. In
time of grinding scarcity democracy always will have hard going. Once upon
a time relief from this kind of economic pressure depended upon increasingly
generous exploitation of readily accessible natural resources, moving into
new territory and milking it dry. But this is not the only way that sort of
economic security can be supplied. It can be supplied also, as we now know,
by increasing technical ingenuity and by improved social organization for
measurably equitable distribution of the products of technological achieve-
ment. It seems increasingly dear that the necessary minimum of tolerable
economic life can be supplied not simply by conquering new territory, but by
conquering new problems, technical and social.
Ignorance is another form of want that can be deadly to democratic
development and continuance. It calls for the accumulation, the systematiza-
tion, the dissemination of knowledge through increasingly effective schemes
of popular education. We take that for granted as one of the primary func-
tions of our democratic society. The supposition that democratic society
can afford to economize at this point has been, for a time, far too widespread
and readily accepted, but in principle it is intolerable. The conquest of
ignorance, then, and the removal of its taboos are vital to democratic living.
It can be argued, indeed, that this enterprise is indispensable not merely to
democratic society, but to any advanced, technologically based form of social
organization; and this may well be one of our best sources of hope with
 NATURAL LAW FORUM

respect to societies in which despotic rule is still being tried. For knowledge
has a way of refusing to stay within artificially prescribed bounds. If one is
to train engineers who can operate a highly complex industrial system, one is
training men who are taught ways of testing evidence. And one cannot guar-
antee that they will refuse to apply these modes of testing to public announce-
ments and to patterns of thought and of life outside the fields of their special
concerns.
Democracy requires safeguards against forced idleness, not merely to
avoid economic privation but to avoid that peculiarly poisonous demoraliza-
tion that comes to people who are made to feel that they are not needed.
In a situation in which men who want to work cannot find work to do, the
possession that is most surely going to suffer is self-respect and human dig-
nity. For the continuance of democratic society, want in any of these forms,
material or spiritual, must be kept under control.
Similarly, there must be effective antidotes to fear. There must be political
stability and integrity: neither rigidity nor too abrupt major change of pattern.
There must be avoidance of big war, which by its very nature requires the
suspension of democratic procedure, either for a brief interval or for a very
long time. There must be the sort of government that plain folk can regard
with at least a sufficient measure of trust, a government with integrity as
well as stability. And there must be emotional assurance, assurance with
respect to the tenacity and meaningfulness of human existence itself. Man
must be confident (but not overconfident) of the significance of his own
make-up and capacity. He must be persuaded that he lives in a world with
the sort of stable and meaningful structure that makes exploratory effort,
the acquisition of fresh insights, the perpetual quest for improvement, signifi-
cant and worthwhile.
Such emotional reassurance involves somewhat directly a way of under-
standing man and his world. It involves a conception of the intrinsic make-
up of human nature, the primary patterns of human behavior, and the way
in which all of these gear into the surrounding reality that has brought man
to birth, that sustains him, and that must be, in the long run, the base on
which his confidence can rest.

II. THE NATURE AND BEHAVIOR OF MAN

AS "POLITICAL ANIMAL"

OUR CONCERN NOW is with the nature of man as political animal. The mere
mention of an attempt to talk about the nature of man flies warning flags. It
suggests, at the outset, that human nature is something precise and sufficiently
ROBERT L. CALHOUN

static so that one can circumscribe it and define it in somewhat complete

fashion. But the truth, of course, is notoriously contrary to such a premise.
Human existence is a complete kind of transition, transition in time, of such
sort that to understand a person as he stands before us it is necessary to know
something about whence he is come and whither he is bound. It is quite
impossible to cut a segment out of a personal life, describe what one finds
within the limits of that segment, and say, "This is the man as he is." It is
characteristic of human nature to be perpetually directed beyond itself, in
time.
There is perpetual transition also in the curious way in which man is
related to his contemporary environment. The inside and the outside of his
life are continually tending to intermingle and interchange. If we try to
draw a neat line around man's skin and to say everything inside this line is
a man and everything outside it is his environment, the effort breaks down.
The very nature of human existence is to be maintaining a perpetual tension
and transition between inside and outside, between center and circumference.
Similarly, and even more puzzling in its implications, it is characteristic
of human existence to be continually in tension between what is and what
might be or ought to be. Man is living constantly in a complex region in
which is and ought, what is actual and what possible, can be distinguished
but can nowhere be satisfactorily split apart, so that we can say, "This is the
actual man, this particular complex fact within this environing set of facts."
The "actual man" is continually reaching beyond any set of facts, in such
wise that he takes into his own being possibilities which he envisages and
evaluates, and claims that he acknowledges. These are aspects of human
existence so familiar that they are scarcely debatable, but their implications
are very far-reaching. They add up, perhaps we can say, to a judgment that
man is a baffling compound of determination and freedom. He is here -
now; but he is also yonder. He is perpetually not quite; he is an always
unfinished self.
Acknowledging such difficulties at the outset, it seems possible, neverthe-
less, to say something about man's nature in the context of factual and value
dimensions in which we find him; then something about familiar patterns of
man's- behavior within these varying contexts; and then, at length, some-
thing about the peculiarly democratic temper which illustrates these com-
plexities in a distinctive way.
First of all, then, what can we say about the nature of man as member
of the complex universe in which we find him carrying on his affairs? One
way to begin is to use the traditional declaration that man is created accord-
ing to the image of God - not in imagine Dei but ad imaginem Dei - to-
 NATURAL LAW FORUM

ward the image of God.8 I find this a highly illuminating formula, but I
shall not use it here save by way of note. We shall be concerned, however,
with at least a part of what I think that formula means. It means, on the
one hand, that man as creature is not self-existent, not self-sufficient. His
very being is dependent upon what is other than himself. Yet among created
beings it can be said of him that he is responsive and responsible in a distinc-
tive way. He is at once bound and free. Without theological commitment,
we can take these secular-sounding terms and go on with them.
If we talk about man at all we must talk about him in a very diverse
environment. Man in isolation is a quite unreal abstraction. If, then, we
talk about man first in his physical environment, I suggest that we find deter-
mination and freedom indicated in varying ways and at varying levels. First
of all, man is a living organism. As such we can say of him, perhaps, that he
is immersed in his physical environment so that it is perpetually entering into
him and he, in turn, is perpetually outgoing into it. It is a truism that by
eating food and breathing air we take into ourselves what only a short time
before was a part of the surrounding world, and that we give back water
vapor and carbon dioxide which were a moment before a part of ourselves.
The most brilliant, succinct comment on this situation that I chance to know
is by a French biologist whom I can no longer identify. He speaks of a living
organism as un tourbillon, a complex whirlpool in the ongoing stream of
physical events, having persistent structure, but with content that is per-
petually changing. Man is something like that, a living disturbance in the
midst of an environment in which he is immersed. At the same time he is
the sort of organism that displays inventive ways, variations, and indi-
viduality.
If we speak of man's physical status in some such fashion as this, I sug-
gest that even at this level we must recognize value dimensions as well. It is
true whether man has come to recognize it or not that there are certain
environmental conditions that are favorable, others that are unfavorable to
his continuance in life, to his health, and to his growth. John Laird in a
treatise on the nature of value suggested a phrase which he applies to this
kind of consideration. There is, said he, a kind of "natural election ' 9 that
exists between physical agencies. It exists in the very nature of the physical
situation, whether or not it has been discovered. Vitamins were requisite for
health before men knew there are such things as vitamins. In a word, the
immersion of the living organism in its surroundings involves a network of

8. This is to follow the main current of Christian theology in starting from the Greek
and Latin versions of Genesis 1: 26, 27.
9. JOHN LAED, THE IDEA OF VALUE ch. iii (1929).
ROBERT L. CALHOUN 43

favoring and disfavoring circumstances which constitute together, with refer-

ence to the continuance, growth, and health of this organism, a kind of prim-
itive value structure. All this is true of man as physical entity.
But secondly man is related to his physical world as conscious subject.
Not only does he live in the midst of it, but he can observe it and judge it.
Once again we must say, that there is limitation on the one hand, and free-
dom on the other. Man as knower is limited, first, by the fact that his sense
organs respond to a restricted spectrum of stimuli. The normal person can
hear as sound the results of stimuli which range, let us say, between 16 cycle
vibrations in each second, and 16,000 cycles; or if his hearing is very acute,
maybe 20,000. Dogs and bats respond to frequencies much higher. But
man's hearing opens to him a quite limited range of possible sounds. So it is
too with respect to color-vision, and to all of his responding sense organs. He
is pent within a set of limits which he never made. But not merely that. His
response as conscious subject is restricted by the tendency, common to learn-
ing organisms, to see what he has become accustomed to see rather than
.what may be clearly and simply before his eyes. One can learn only by
establishing habit patterns, but the habit patterns tend to become lenses
through which new and fresh experiences are refracted. One is limited in
respect of understanding because of the impossibility of translating immediate
sensory awareness without loss into conceptual generalization, and of re-
translating concepts without ambiguity into words or other symbols.
At the same time man is free in a way that is crucial to the very possibil-
ity of knowing at all; he is able to transcend, in cognitive behavior, the
limits of any physical basis. One is able to compare what is here now with
what has been but is no longer, or with what may yet come to be but is not.
He can even compare what is now with what possibly might be, but never has
been and perhaps never will be. He can compare what is with what ought
to be, but is not yet. In this familiar but astonishing capacity for compara-
tive judgment and for criticism, man displays the peculiar sort of autonomy
(radically different from mere indeterminacy) that distinguishes knowing
subjects from known objects, persons from things.
Not only is man capable thus of judgment, he is capable of appreciation
and enjoyment, of laughter and tears. It has been said that man is the only
animal who laughs and weeps, because he is the only animal who recognizes
the discrepancy between what is and what might be. He is capable of aspira-
tion and worship; that is to say, he is capable of seeking his good well beyond
the reach of his present being, and acknowledging ultimate dependence on
Being immeasurably beyond his own existence.
Besides transcending his environment in these very diverse ways, slip-
 NATURAL LAW FORUM

ping through its meshes and confronting it from dimensions other than its
own, man also transcends himself. He can, so to say, back off and watch
himself engaged in judging, then back off another step and take note of the
fact that he is observing himself engaged in the act of judging. He is able to
carry that process a considerable number of stages back, without ever reach-
ing a point which, in principle, is the last stage. Self-transcendence in this
fashion - being able to make oneself an object of observation and judgment
- makes possible self-criticism and some measure of self-direction. I can say
I am less resourceful in meeting a problem than I might be and ought to be,
and I can deliberately train myself to do better.
For man as conscious subject, even more obviously than for man as
physical organism, value dimensions are inescapable. He needs opportunity
for learning the distinction between true and false, coherent and incoherent,
relevant and irrelevant. He is amenable to claims of a kind that the simpler
animals apparently do not recognize at all: the demand for truth as against
falsehood or error, the demand for beauty as against ugliness or banality, the
demand for rightness as against inequity, and so on. Man is a conscious sub-
ject, responsible in the sense that he is able to respond to stimuli of a kind
other than those supplied by the simple physical facts among which he lives.
Man confronts his physical world, thirdly, as purposeful worker: tool-maker
and tool-user. This is so distinctive of human life that social anthropologists
regard any artifact, even a bit of stone chipped for a cutting edge, as clear
evidence that a human being has been at work. Man as tool-maker and tool-
user is of course limited in all sorts of ways: in respect of strength, range of
temporal and spatial activity, and dependence upon materials that can be
found or somehow fabricated. But he is, at the same time, free to remake in
the most amazing ways the physical world into which he has been born. He
makes for himself an artificial environment in the midst of the natural envi-
ronment - caves more commodious and pathways more level than those
which nature has provided. Man as purposeful worker is capable, thus, of
exercising an impressive measure of mastery over the physical world. If we
ask what are the values involved in this sort of ability and its exercise, we
are constrained to say they are highly ambiguous. On the one hand, the
reshaping of earth and of atoms can be conducive to well-being for the
worker and for others. But on the other hand the results can bring both want
and disaster in ways he had not been able to foresee.
In relation to his physical environment, then, at all these levels, man dis-
plays the combination of limitedness and freedom, of constraint and sponta-
neity, that befits the notion of human existence as perpetual structured
transition.
ROBERT L. CALHOUN 45

But next, man lives in a cultural environment which is as distinctive for

human existence as the artificial buildings and highways that he has laid out by
his own effort. Culture is a peculiarly human achievement which bears some
likeness to physical artifacts, but which is perhaps more dissimilar than sim-
ilar to these works of men's hands. Various components in culture - works
of art, systems of trade, codes of law - are largely planned; but myth, lan-
guage, custom grow, for the most part, like living things rather than artifacts.
Yet by comparison with highly organized animal societies, human culture is
distinctive in at least these two major ways. 10 On the one hand the division
of labor in a human society is not dependent, as in an ant hill, or a colony of
termites, or a beehive, upon simple physical and physiological differences
among the individual members. On the other hand - and this is more im-
portant for our purposes - in a human culture the individual member is
susceptible of modification by his membership in the community, in a way in
which the individual bee or ant or termite apparently is not. In human soci-
ety every individual is, in large measure, shaped as regards both his external
behavior and his ways of feeling, of understanding, of evaluating. He inter-
nalizes in his own fashion the life of the group around him, and becomes an
individual in so doing. As member of a human society he is immersed in an
invisible environment which, like his physical environment, interflows with
him, which colors his thoughts and impulses, and enables him to be the per-
son he is. To draw a line around him and say, "Inside is John Doe and
outside is the social setting," is quite impossible. The social setting is inside
John Doe too. It is not the whole of him. He sees the world through his
own eyes, in a perspective that no one else can have. His decisions are his
own; at bottom, no one else can make them. Individual purpose and achieve-
ment mark human culture at various important points. We build halls of
government, and structures of law. We build market places, and credit sys-
tems. In some measure our cultures are amenable to purposeful intent and
activity on our part. But on the other hand, to a very considerable extent
our cultures grow, not by reason of our intent but almost, as it were, in spite
of it. We grow in the midst of them, and we affect their growth. And again,
the effort to split the one pole from the other becomes quite futile.
What shall we say of man now as social unit in a community of this sort?
We can talk first about his factual status therein and the contributory role
which, as member of the community, he must perform. He must engage in
meaningful communication with his fellows. This is the very hallmark of
human society and personal intercourse. And he must engage in competitive

10. Cf. GEORGE HERBERT MEAD, MIND, SELF AND SOCIETY (1934).
 NATURAL LAW FORUM

cooperation with his neighbors. He must take his part in getting the work
of the community done. He must be a member of the working force. As
such, to an extent he is culturally conditioned; to an extent he is radically
individual. Even though he would not be the person that he is save for the
shaping to which he is continuously subjected, he never is completely a cell
in a social body. Always his capacity for transcendence, for recognizing that
which is not but might be, perhaps that which is not but ought to be, colors
his relationship to his community, as well as his relationship to his physical
environing world.
With respect to this normative aspect of man's role in society, Josiah
Royce has used a phrase which I have long found immensely illuminating."
He speaks of "the moral burden of the individual," who can become the
person that he must become only if he is at once loyal to his community and
on occasion sets himself in resistance against its demands. Think of the grow-
ing child. The child who never reaches the point of setting his will against
the parents' will, against the family pattern, or what not, will never become
an adult. On the other hand a child who is from the beginning alone wolf,
who never learns what it is to give loyalty, will hardly become a wholesome
adult. Only the person who displays both devotion and critical dissent will
grow to full stature as human person. This is "the moral burden" that each
of us bears.
In somewhat more abstract terms, each of us is constructed to become a
responsible self. That means, first, responsible in the primitive sense that we
have already noted: able and ready to respond to value claims. It means
also responsible in another sense: ready to affirm as my own the claim that
I recognize justly lays hold upon me, to identify my will with demands that
originate beyond my own desires. It means acknowledging that- obligation
is intrinsic to personal existence. A responsible person is one who in con-
fronting a fellow human being forthwith recognizes that the existence of the
other lays him under obligation. It is not simply that the respective purposes
of the two involve reciprocal claims. The very existence of the two involves
such reciprocal claims. To come upon a thing is to come upon what I may
suitably use as an instrument for carrying out an end of my own. To con-
front a person is to confront one whom I must regard as a center of purposes,
with whom I enter into communication and cooperation, but whom I am not
free to treat as a thing.
The central principle here can be put into familiar Kantian terms. 12 A

11. 1 THE PROBLEM OF CHRISTIANITY ch. iii.

12. KANT, GROUNDWORK OF THE METAPHYSIC OF MORALS, transi. in H. J. PATON, THE
MORAL LAW 82-104 (1950).
ROBERT L. CALHOUN 47

growing person is subject, as active self, to imperatives of two kinds. Some

are technical, conditional, "hypothetical," "empirical" demands defined and
imposed by some goal of natural desire and the empirical conditions for
achieving it. To attain wealth I must practice industry and thrift. To achieve
skill as a violinist I must practice scales and exercises. Such imperatives can
be nullified by simply abjuring the goal that requires them. Not everyone is
obliged to seek wealth or musical skill. Very different is the one universal,
unconditional, "categorical" imperative, defined and imposed not by some
desired goal but by the intrinsic nature of personal existence. Every person,
whatever his individual desires and under all circumstances, is obligated to
behave as rational, responsible self, not as carefree egoist or child of nature.
This obligation I cannot avoid, since it is integral to my own being. For
that very reason it is less easy to formulate than if it were a function of a
particular goal. Kant's proposed statements are probably as good as any:
Act always as you would will that anyone in your place should act, "as if the
motive from which you act were to become through your will a universal
law of nature." "Act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own person
or in the person of another, always as an end, never as merely a means."
"Act so that the will may regard itself as in its maxims laying down universal
laws." 1 3 These are three ways of saying what it means to behave as a
responsible person.
The person thus understood, I suggest finally, is a kind of growing point
in the community. In giving to the community his loyalty but guarding the
duty of individual judgment and decision, he will make what contribution
he can to widening horizons of insight, sharpening the sensitivity of evalua-
tion, and extending the area of common understanding. He will be in the
community a self who belongs to it, but who is not absorbed by it.
Now if such a person be considered in a political environment, we can
say as a citizen he is a meeting point of private and public interest and need.
He has his own personal concerns, but he must learn to seek the fulfillment
of those concerns within a fabric of reciprocal social behavior. To be a good
citizen, he needs an imaginative sense of the community as inclusive and
growing whole, a real and rightful claimant upon him, but subject to critical
judgment. As official his task is more complex, for now he is at once bearer
of his own personal concerns and aspirations, and representative of his con-
stituents, and he must try to be the voice for their concerns. Some of them
pretty obviously are restricted and selfish concerns. Some of them are genu-
inely conducive or possibly conducive to the well-being of the community

13. KANT, op. cit. supra note 12, at 269, 277, 282.
 NATURAL LAW FORUM

as a whole. As official he must be alert to such differences. His job is to

represent both those who have elected him to office and, others who are no
less truly his constituents, whose interest he is bound by proper oath to respect
and try to serve. He too needs the same kind of sense for res publica, the
well-being of the people.
Let us turn now from the intrinsic nature of man in his several inter-
meshing environments to some familiar aspects of his social-political behavior.
First of all, man operates in this context as at once competitor and learner.
He is inevitably a competitor of his fellow man, with a strong primary urge
to get satisfactions and to overcome frustrations. If I am an alert competitor
in a social situation to which I am sensitive, I am likely to find that over a
period of time the methods that get satisfaction or relief from pain will
undergo significant change. At first my tendency is to apply crude force,
engage in combat and get what I want by disposing of my adversary. Later
I resort to a complex and ingenious mode of exploitation, so that instead of
destroying him I somewhat enlist him as an instrument for my satisfaction.
Perhaps I will pass beyond that point, and find myself resorting to collabora-
tive rather than exploitative tactics, still by way of getting the satisfaction on
which I have been intent all along. 14
It may be that the very character of the satisfaction I want will also
change. At first I want a simple pleasure, and I want it now. Later perhaps
I want an anticipated pleasure, still simple but not yet readily at hand, and
I lay plans and subject myself to discipline in hope of that pleasure in time
to come. Perhaps I find myself getting pleasure not so much out of simple
stimuli which I can possess, but rather out of the very process of achievement,
the putting forth of effort and gaining skill. I get satisfaction now on a much
more complex basis and in much subtler forms. In due course I may find
satisfaction not simply in what I am able to do; I get satisfaction out of the
achievement or the well-being of others. Both the method by which I seek
fulfillment and the kind of fulfillment I seek are thus susceptible of social
education.
Man is not merely competitor, then. He is practically a perpetual learner
face to face with his fellow men and with the world they have in common.
He seeks knowledge, partly as an instrument which he can turn to his own
advantage, the knowledge that is power if one knows how to put it to work.
But knowledge can be not merely a tool. It can be an immediate source of
a very special kind of satisfaction and fulfillment. Somewhat surprisingly
that can be true whether the knowledge be favorable or unfavorable to the
private ends upon which I thought I was set. Even to learn for dead sure
14. Cf. W. E. HocxiNG, HUMAN NATURE, AND rTs REMAKING ch. xxv (1918).
ROBERT L. CALHOUN

an unpleasant fact brings its own peculiar tang of excitement and exhilara-
tion. The thrill is to make contact with what I am persuaded is really there.
I didn't see it before; now I see it. Even if it is something that threatens me
with harm, nevertheless I face it now not blindly, but with my eyes open.
This delight in knowledge as immediate achievement and source of enhance-
ment of oneself as person is perhaps less common than the more hardheaded
gratification of one who has acquired a modicum of truth he can exploit.
But the sheer satisfaction of gaining new insight is a powerful lure for some
of the most laborious questing in which men engage. Knowledge thus gained
is cumulative, self-corrective, expansive, and contagious. Trying to keep it
within preconceived bounds almost always proves futile. Once we expose
ourselves to the fascination of new insight, it frequently takes over, imposes
itself and its rules, its demands and its resources upon us, makes us different
persons, and changes the mode of our living in unexpected ways.
Man as competitor and learner, man in his more aggressive mood, striving
for his own satisfaction, is, then, amenable to a curious kind of discipline,
noncoercive and intrinsic in the process of becoming a mature, knowledgeable
person. This same process has another side. Social-political man is not only
competitor and seeker. He is inescapably cooperator, participant, sharer.
Whether there is a phylogenetic base for this impulse to share is debatable.
I strongly suspect that there is. At any rate the discussion that went on years
ago between Piotr Kropotkin and Robert Briffault, spokesmen for zoology
and social anthropology, left the balance tilted toward an affirmative con-
clusion. Kropotkin urged in broad terms that mutual aid is a vital factor in
evolution, insisting that among gregarious forms of life reciprocal support
among members of a group contributes directly to biological survival. 15
Briffault poked fun at Kropotkin's conviction that gregarious herds display
a kind of tribal altruism, but stressed the biological importance of the readi-
ness of animal mothers to seek the safety of their offspring, even at the cost
of their own lives. 16 It seems to me that, though they differ in detail, both
men point to the same fundamental fact: our mode of animal life is such
that without "mutual aid" in some form, we should not be here at all.
However that may be, the cultural necessity for balancing competition with
cooperation at all social levels is scarcely disputable. It is simply impossible
to operate a large-scale social enterprise, even of a competitive kind, without
a requisite measure of cooperation among those who are engaged in at-
tempting to push the enterprise through. That men can work together, often

15. P. KROPOTKIN, MUTUAL AID AS A FACTOR OF EVOLUTION. Cf. AUGUSTINE, DE Civi-

TATE DEI XIX, xii.
16. R. BRIFPAULT, THE MOTHERS (1927).
 NATURAL LAW FORUM

with much sympathy and understanding, is so obvious that we take it for

granted. But familiarity should not blind us to the surprising character and
the theoretic significance of the everyday fact. It virtually rules out, as social
theory, the atomistic individualism once fashionable. It rules out no less
emphatically, as psychological or as ethical theory, any one-sided view of man
as impervious competitive egoist. In this respect, as in so many others, human
nature is strongly ambivalent.
Let us turn, finally, to a specific manifestation or disposition of this com-
plex, many-sided nature: what may be called the democratic temper. Four
sentiments especially characterize it.
One is robust liking and respect for people as people. The core of such
liking and respect goes very deep, rooted in the primitive recognition and
appreciation of another human being as truly another center of personal
existence. It is not easy to keep such a statement from sounding merely tauto-
logical. Perhaps we can start from what is called reverence for another,
whether it be an adult or a child, in which primary stress is laid upon his
otherness from myself. The child whom I treat as a means to my pride, or
a source of irritation to my convenience, is a child whom I regard with some-
thing other than reverence. But if I recognize in my child one who cannot
be reduced to an aspect of myself, one who confronts me as an independent
center, a growing center of experience not my own, one who in certain speci-
fiable ways lays claims upon me and may even be regarded as superior to
me - he will outlive me if things go well, and surely will experience much
that I shall never be able to experience - if I view him thus as a truly other
self, I find a quite induplicable sort of satisfaction in just having him here
in his own right. This fundamental liking for persons as persons witnesses in
important measure the satisfaction of getting beyond the persona which is
one's public mask, to a core of real personal existence. There is a sort of
warmth and excitement that one can get in no other way, when one finds
oneself assured that here, face to face with oneself, is an unexplorable other
center of human experience. Without that kind of delight in other people
as people it is hard to conceive why discriminating folk should find special
satisfaction in a democratic ordering of affairs, rather than in suitably hedged
aristocracy. But if there is exuberant liking for people, then the differences
- of manner, of gifts, of capacity - which otherwise can become so trouble-
some fall into their appropriate perspectives. Granted that want and fear
are absent, one can welcome these individual differences as sources of enrich-
ment for oneself and for the life of the group. If fear and want interfere,
then the differences become signals for hostile reaction, and the satisfaction
that one should be finding in the otherness of his neighbors becomes distorted.
ROBERT L. CALHOUN

Equality and inequality seem to me bound up in this same sort of pattern.

Basic equality is equality of existence as person, and this must be steadily
maintained. It precedes and justifies "equality before the law," which pre-
supposes equality of status as human beings. Granted that, all sorts of in-
equalities can be taken for granted and overarched. It would be silly to
think I can find satisfaction only in talking with those who know as much as
I know. I enjoy talking with an inquisitive child - without any need to
"talk down." I enjoy talking with students. Their range of information is
not identical with mine, but I can learn from every one of them, and I hope
that each of them comes to know it and to know that I know it. The in-
equalities that make so much trouble are not to be wished away. In a suitable
context, they can be welcomed, as contributory to a fabric of personal re-
lations in which our basic satisfaction lies in authentic confrontation with
one another.
The democratic temper is marked, secondly, by appreciation of and
satisfaction in contributive work. This will mean, in the first instance, some
sense of individual vocation. There is a job that I can do. It probably could
not be done in the same fashion by anyone else, and my loyalty is given to it.
It becomes for me a source of many sorts of satisfaction, among which per-
haps the most important is self-respect. It enables me to feel that I am
making a contribution of significance to others as well as to myself, and in
working thus as a member of the group, I become a more fully valid indi-
vidual person.
But it will mean also recognition of sound work done by others, and satis-
faction also in that. It must be the sort of satisfaction in solid achievement
that can rise above personal likes and dislikes, and the very real stresses and
risks of group rivalries. A discerning Catholic priest at the time that Sputnik
first went up voiced in my hearing an expression of gratification that the
human race had shared in this achievement. That struck me as the right.
kind of response. It was not our doing, but it has been done, and we can
take sober satisfaction in the sort of resourcefulness, discipline, and large-
scale promise that such achievement involves. This is not to recommend
closing our eyes to the peril to us and to values that we cherish. It is to say
the genuinely democratic person will react with excitement to genuinely good
work, whether it be his own or someone else's.
Thirdly, such a person must display a strongly developed sense of propor-
tion and robust humor. He must be quick to make a sagacious distinction
between appearance and reality. This capacity may come out of his experi-
ence as worker, especially if a part of his work is manual work. One who
works at matching boards, working metal, or pouring concrete learns to
 NATURAL LAW FORUM

respect bench marks and measurements. The distinction between what he

would like and what is so is a distinction the manual worker cannot bypass.
The needed realism must include the habit of sizing up oneself, and one's
own achievement, with as much objectivity as one can muster. It should
include an adult sense of humor, which belongs properly to this sort of readi-
ness to recognize reality for what it is, and to see its discrepancy from what
sometimes pretends to be the real. A quick and sure awareness of the comic
has strong cleansing power, especially if it be turned on oneself, one's own
showier efforts to maximize one's ego, to maintain publicly a persona to which
one is not entitled. The same bracing restorative can be good for one's
neighbor as well. Humor, I suggest, rather than wit, for humor can exercise
criticism warmed and edged with sympathy. Wit is very likely to display
competitive spirit rather than companionship. Humor is the sense of reality
at work among companions who can laugh at one another, and each at
himself, and find a kind of relief and catharsis in so doing.
It goes without saying that democrats must recognize what on the surface
is comic but actually is dangerous and tragic: the brown shirts and big boots,
the pagan ceremonials, the man on horseback. Our healthy human instinct
is to laugh them off forthwith, and laughter they surely deserve. But laughter
must be nicely distributed as between those situations in which nothing more
than laughter is called for, and those in which there is need for a tougher
kind of resistance as well. Demagoguery is funny to an adult onlooker; but
demagoguery is a sort of poison that did its part in the killing of Athenian
democracy, and is perpetually attempting to do the same job for more re-
cent efforts at democratic living.
Last of all, the democratic temper displays a tough kind of intellectual
inquisitiveness, together with a basic confidence in the trustworthiness of
genuinely ordered reality to be explored. Such inquisitiveness persistently
seeks more light, preferring the verdict of what is experienceable to the ipse
dixit even of the acknowledged expert. It insists upon asking pertinent ques-
tions, and getting, if possible, pertinent answers to them. It welcomes correc-
tion of mistakes - including one's own mistakes - as a matter of course.
It encourages clash of opinions, since nobody has the whole truth; and debate
is one way of making it likely that more of us will get access to more of the
truth than we should if we tried to maintain imposed conformity.
As counterpart to such inquisitiveness, the democratic temper has con-
fidence that we live in the midst of an ordered, explorable, and dependable
reality that can be, in part, really known. That reality includes meaningful
patterns to be sought, recognized, and used as a basis for prediction and
for further inquiry; and beyond those discoverable patterns, whatever it is
ROBERT L. CALHOUN

that holds a patterned world-order together in being. There is confidence

also that the order of reality is such as to offer guidance not only to man's
understanding but also to his capacities for appreciation and decision. As
we have already urged, it is a world in which fact and value are intricately
combined. If it were not so, there would be no room for a doctrine of natural
law; and I think there would be no solid footing for democracy.

III. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF NATURAL LAW FOR DEMOCRACY

WE COME NOW to the central thesis of these lectures. We have argued

that political democracy derives its primary dynamic from a certain dispo-
sition deeply rooted in the nature of man: a distinctive democratic temper
that finds satisfaction in diverse and relatively uncoerced human relation-
ships and in manifestations of the fundamental personal existence that is
common to all human beings. At the same time we have recognized that
the successful practice of political democracy requires a number of favoring
conditions, some internal, some environmental, some in various ways suscepti-
ble of human contrivance, some beyond our power to produce or to destroy.
It is now to be urged that among these last conditions must be accounted
some such intrinsic ordering of fact and value as the traditional doctrine of
natural law has sought in varying terms to envisage.
Whether such ordering does exist is of course debatable and warmly
debated. If it does not, no fervor of wishing or arguing can make it real.
My concern here is not to attempt either proof or disproof. It is twofold:
to re-examine the familiar course of development of natural law doctrine in
Western thought, with some hope of distinguishing its essential, continuing
concern in the midst of its varying forms; and to emphasize its especial
significance for those who seek to vindicate the theory and practice of de-
mocracy as realistic and rational.
It may be noticed at once that the features of political democracy that
most need such vindication are its most characteristic, distinctive ones: its
predilection for encouraging plural initiative, reaching decisions through
public debate, and safeguarding political opposition and social dissent. Re-
specting the primal functions of a government - maintaining public order,
by coercion if need be, defining and executing public policies, maintaining
common defense, engaging in various public relations with other govern-
ments - there is broad agreement between democrats and anti-democrats.
Disagreement centers on the way these functions are to be carried out, and
more fundamentally on the source and character of governmental authority,
and the proper relation of government to human existence. With regard
 NATURAL LAW FORUM

to these more fundamental issues, democrats and anti-democrats stand on

sharply different ground.
Defenders of despotism may of course appeal (as in fact they have done
more than once) to some sort of natural sanction - divine right of kings,
natural right of the stronger - but they need not do so. A kind of rationale
for despotism can be worked out, up to a point, in positivistic or crassly
pragmatic terms. Hobbes made that plain in theory, and in practice there is
a kind of rough plausibility in a blunt assertion that trying to go back of
the authority of a visible government to some invisible "higher law" makes
for confusion, of a sort that cannot be tolerated in time of crisis and had
better be avoided at any time. The soundest political practice is that which
matter-of-factly accepts a duly established government as exercising final
authority in fact, and determining by its decisions what is politically right.
But to defenders of democracy no such apparently simple course is open.
If the encouragement of political opposition and genuine public debate,
and the protecting of dissenting minorities, can be justified as rational practice,
it must be because majority preferences and governmental decisions, even
constitutional provisions, are regarded as open to legitimate criticism and
possible correction. Such criticism and correction require a norm, a frame
of reference that ultimately must transcend the government, statutes, and
constitution under debate. Such a norm the doctrine of natural law has
affirmed, and tried in various ways to expound. To such a norm, expressly
regarded as natural law, the opponents of Charles I and the signers of the
Declaration of Independence appealed, and in so doing put forward their
demands for democratic government as rationally grounded demands. In
principle their way of vindicating a rationale for democracy seems to me
the right way.
To get this view into suitable perspective, I find it simplest to look briefly
at the traditional role of natural law in the development of Western thought,
not for antiquarian ends but to make clear what I understand the doctrine
to have meant in our culture, before seeking to apply it to our present problem.
Let us begin then with the ancient philosophic concept of Nature, from
which the concept of natural law is one characteristic outgrowth. When
philosophy as a systematic discipline emerged in the sixth century B.c. among
the Greeks, trying to free itself from polytheistic mythology, the favorite title
of philosophic treatises was "On Nature." I,' rV 17 (Nature) as the pre-
Socratic schools understood it means primarily a living body, self-existing,
self-developing, self-ordering, at once factual and normative, imposing neces-
17. From 0i6m, 06oiLaL, a verb that can mean, among other things, to beget or produce, to
be born, to become, and to be. Cf. the Latin natura, from nascor, to be born, to begin.
ROBERT L. CALHOUN

sary conditions on physical events, and obligations on rational beings. It is

regularly called "divine," though not in the anthropomorphic sense that
marks Homer's pantheon,' 8 and the language of moral judgment is applied
to Nature as a matter of course. Thus Anaximander, who thought of the
plurality of things as arising from the emergence, conflict, and mutual en-
croachments of the cosmic "opposites" - the hot and the cold, the wet and
Athe dry - regarded their eventual breakdown and reabsorption as a kind
of moral retribution. "For they make amends and recompense to one another
for the injustice (d&Klav, sc. of their prior encroachments), according to the
order of time"' 9 - the round of the seasons and the years. Even Heraclitus,
who rejects his predecessor's notion that strife is "injustice," and affirms a
deeper, subtler "harmony" in perpetual tension, a higher "justice" in strife
in which opposites merge into the fluid unity of "ever-living Fire," ° insists
that order is maintained. The Fire that is Nature moves according to "meas-
ures" (.Le'pa, X6yo ).2i So "the sun will not transgress his measures, else
the Avengers ('EpLvwv), the helpers of Justice (AW-rj), will find him out." 2
It is almost impossible not to agree with the main thesis of Professor Corn-
ford at this point,2 3 that the earliest pre-Socratic philosophers applied to
Nature the language and the modes of thought that had long been applied
to the towering figure of Destiny (Molpa, Ell&p= v , 'Av d c). Older and
more powerful than the Olympian gods, Destiny had long been venerated
as the chief guardian of those boundaries and landmarks in the world of gods
and men that serve as guides to right conduct. To live within one's proper
station (as man and not god, as Lord of the sea but not of earth or sky)
was to live in accordance with "right" (&'n). To "transgress the measures"
of one's allotted mode of life was v,8ps - an untranslatable compound of
arrogance, rebellion, sacrilege, and violation of duly established order. Punish-
ment of vptpq was one function of Destiny, not a person like ABjvq or WS
but an impersonal agency whose names suggest two sides of its nature..
-Aviyc' means necessity, compulsion, coercion - the exertion of force as
simple matter of fact. Molp4 and Elpapdve 24 both refer to apportionment,
allotment, distribution, or dispensation - the assignment of posts to be filled,

18. For evidence see H. DIELS, DME FRAGMENTE DER VORSOKRATIKER (3rd ed.), or a
similar source book. Thus Anaximander "and most of the physiologers" - so Aristotle, in
DIaLS, op. cit., I. 17, lines 35-6. On Anaximenes, id. at 23. 10-11; 24. 11-13, 16-17. On
Xenophanes, id. at 50. 17-20; 62. fragments 23,24.
19. DIELS, op. cit. supra note 18, at I. 15. 28-9.
20. Id. at I. 77 seq., frgg. 8, 51, 53, 54, 80, 30.
21. Id. at I. 84, frgg. 30, 31.
22. Id. at I. 96, frg. 94.
23. F. M. CORNFORD, FROM RELIGION TO PHILOSOPHY (1912).
24. Both derive from pelpo/Aa,, to divide or apportion,
 NATURAL LAW FORUM

with a clear implication of duty, of right and wrong, and of appropriate

sanctions. Molpa is especially interesting for our present purpose, since it
directly suggests our Latin-based terms moral and merit, and quite possibly
is an early member of their family tree. When Nature, then, was invested
(among other attributes) with the ambivalent character of Destiny, it as-
sumed the double role of force and norm. It was held as philosophic truth
that in the ongoing and self-sustaining process of Nature there is provision
for restoration of balance, if either things or persons transgress their allotted
guide-lines.
Another term for these allotments was v4zov, law, from vE'/im, another
verb meaning to deal out, dispense, distribute, and so plainly belonging in
the group of ideas we have just examined. But there is an important dif-
ference. N'p s is "dispensed" not by impersonal Destiny but by a personal
lawgiver: Zeus in heaven, Solon or Lycurgus on earth.2 5 It can therefore be
contrasted with pLolpa as fate-determined lot. N4&ol implies reason as its
source. Before it could readily be combined with Nature into a concept of
natural law, it was necessary that Nature should be decisively conjoined
with Reason. Heraclitus in his ironic, paradoxical way sometimes spoke as
if he thought of the world in such fashion, 2 6 and expressly spoke of "the one
divine law" from which "all human laws (vO'Fot) are nourished."'2 7 But in
the light of other sayings that help define the context of his thought as a
whole, it is evident that both X6 o in Nature and divine vo'po must be
understood as antithetic to what men ordinarily call reason; since in reality
all opposites merge into a fluid identity that resists all efforts at rational
analysis and moral discrimination. 2 8 Anaxagoras's treatment of "Mind"
29
(Nons) as a corporeal force rather than a purposeful agent is well known.
Archelaos, his Athenian successor and Socrates's reputed teacher, is said to
have held that "right and wrong are not by nature (0,ret) but by law
(vdF)" 30 -i.e., by convention. The Atomists denied to Nature any prop-
erties but geometric and mechanical ones; and Democritus used the term
vdow in the disparaging sense of convention as opposed to truth or reality. 8 '
Greek thought in fact was not ready to combine Nature and Law until
another corner had been turned.
25. See CORNFORD, Op. cit. supra note 23, at 26-31.
26. DMLS, op. Cit. supra note 18, at I. 86. frg. 41 ; 85, 20 frg. 32. Cf. 94 frg. 83, and the
ubiquitous references to X6-yor, too easily understood as Reason by both ancient (Stoic) and
modern interpreters.
27. Id. at I. 99-100. frg. 114. Cf. 86. frg. 44.
28. Id. at I. 98. frg. 102; 99. frg. 108; 90-91. frg. 67; 89. frgg. 58, 60; 88. frg. 52; etc.
29. Id. at I. 405-6. frg. 13; 404-5; frgg. 11, 12; cf. PLATO, PHAEDO 97b-98b, and Aristotle's
similar comment.
30. DIOGENEs LAERTIUs, IVES II. 16.
31. Cf. DIELS, op. cit. supra note 18, at I. 60. frg. 9; 85. frg. 125; etc.
ROBERT L. CALHOUN

The men who prompted the turn were the cultured, traveled relativists,
skeptics, and "realists" we know as the Sophists of Pericles's time. They
were scornful of the whole philosophic enterprise that sought to understand
Nature as ordered and intelligible. "Of all things man is the measure,"
wrote Protagoras. As things appear to each, so they are - to him. There
is no objective, common "measure." And he brushed aside any attempt
to think about the gods. 3 2 Gorgias, with his treatise, "On What Is Not, or
On Nature," argued for thoroughgoing skepticism. 3 3 In moral and political
theory, Protagoras at least was sober and conservative. 34 But the epistemo-
logical relativism and skepticism of these older Sophists opened the way to
moral and political radicalism among some of their successors, who may well
have been influenced also by Herodotus's picturesque traveler's tales of local
customs so diverse that the same act could be obligatory in one place and
sacrilegious in another. One recurrent feature in the political views of the
later Sophists and their admirers was a sharp disjunction between 4Os5o9 and
vo/oT. 35 Some of them- the Sophist Antiphon, the politician Callicles-
seem to have argued for the superiority of the "usages" (vojp.qa) of Nature
that favor the strong and shrewd as against mere law (v61o1), a "conven-
tion" (9fo0-s) that curbs the strong and favors the weak. At least one,
Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, scorned the whole notion of right as a fraudulent
social disguise for de facto superiority in force. 3 6 To such men, for differing
reasons and with differing consequences, Nature and Law were antithetic.
A turning point came in Athens with the vigorous questioning enterprise
in which Socrates engaged as a god-appointed mission. He urged that if
Sophists like Protagoras were entitled to their claim to "teach virtue," they
were assuming after all what they professed to deny. If virtue (i.e., excel-
lence) can be taught, it must be knowledge of a sort. But if it is knowledge,
then it is something other than an opinion that can vary from person to
person and from city to city. Against Callicles and Thrasymachus, cham-
pions of "injustice" if practiced by the strong, he resorted to reductio ad
absurdum.37 How far he may have followed up his early interest in the

32. Id. at II. 228. frg. 1; 229-230. frg. 4.

33. The argument seems to be summarized fully by Sextus Empiricus. See his text in
DIELs, op. cit. supra note 18, at II. 243-246.
34. Cf. PLATO, PROTAGORAS 322.
35. Plato represents Hippias, ambassador from Elis and one of the earlier Sophists, as
saying to an assembled company from various cities: "I consider you all to be kinsmen,
neighbors, and citizens by nature (06fCL), not by law (v6pq') ... the law (v6Pws), a tyrant
over men, forces many things contrary to nature." PROTAGORAS 337c-d.
36. For a brief conspectus of Sophist doctrines of Nature and Law, cf. ERNEST BARKER,
GREEK POLITICAL THEORY: PLATO AND HIS PREDECESSORS ch. iv (3rd ed., 1947).
37. Cf. PLATO, PROTAGORAS passim; THEAETETUS 161-179, esp. 172; GORGIAS 488-514;
REPUBLIC Bk. I.
 NATURAL LAW FORUM

metaphysical insights of his predecessors it is hard to say. Most likely he

was more concerned with finding a sound basis for human knowledge and
conduct than for speculations about Nature; but his own chosen course of
inquiry was rich in metaphysical implications.
Plato enthusiastically developed them in his own way. He reaffirmed
vigorously, with elaborate argument, what the Sophists had denied: that
existence and good belong together. He maintained that to understand the
failure of Athenian democracy and to start with better hope of success, it
is vital to see that stable government must rest on profounder insight into
the nature of man. But if man is to be rightly understood, such insight must
extend also to the world in which man has to live. And that world, so Plato
urged, displays an ordered, graduated structure, polarized toward a sovereign
principle he called "the Good," which can be glimpsed and recognized, in
a kind of intellectual vision, but not classified as an instance of something
more ultimate. Far from being a function of social custom, the Good is
transcendent, he says, "beyond Being" and beyond thought, of which it is
the indispensable source, as the sun is of sight.-" In the Good all things real
in their various ways "participate," in the sense that the whole realm of
being is pervaded by an intricate network of interrelationships oriented under
that supreme principle. This is not to say that the world is simply good.
On the contrary, evils are many. It is to say that the world with all its faults
is oriented toward the transcendent focal point, and everywhere bears witness
to its presence.
If human conduct is to be rightly directed, then, it must be guided by
increasingly clear and systematic understanding of the network of significant
relationships that binds the existent universe. The Good remains beyond
reach. This view Plato never abandoned. In one of his latest dialogues, he
still maintained that it is impossible to say simply what the Good is. We can
point to it; we can recognize a road toward its habitation; we can approach
its home, even stand in the vestibule. We can say the true, the beautiful, and
the fit bring us close to the Good in three of its aspects.39 If we are engaged
in intellectual inquiry, the Good manifests itself as truth over against error
and falsehood. If we engage in esthetic enterprise, the Good manifests itself
as beauty over against banality and ugliness. If we seek what is right, the
Good manifests itself as fitness over against what is unfit. These manifesta-
tions are not to be identified with the Good or thought of as exhausting it.
They display its presence in various areas of human activity, while it remains
all the while more than they.

38. RzPUBLC 508e-509b; 517b-c; 532b-c.

39. PEILEDus 61a-65a.
ROBERT L. CALHOUN

If we cannot say, then, what "the Good" is, what sort of use can we
find in affirming its presence? It defines for us a polarity such that we
can recognize. direction toward and direction away from that transcendent
goal, which neither we nor anyone else in concrete living will ever fully grasp.
By its light we can know whether we are moving in the right or the wrong
direction. For Plato this sort of polarity, hierarchical structure, directionality,-
intrinsic to the real world itself,4 0 is the basis for such orientation of human
living as may overcome the failure of self-control he had seen in his own
beloved city. To help prevent such failure for the future, he had founded
his own school for advanced studies and devoted to it the mature years of
his long life.
For some twenty years the young Aristotle was a member of the Academy;
and however else he differed in his reading of Plato's problems, he agreed
on the hierarchical ordering of Nature and the need for orientation of human
conduct within that scheme. For him the culminating principle is God,
supremely active Mind - the one instance of pure reality, untainted with
any unrealized potentiality or capacity. God is full self-realization (iv'py a),
beyond the mixed world of matter and form, possibility and actuality, that
comprises all lesser beings. His aloof perfection is the model toward which
41
all other beings strive, each within the bounds of its own specific nature.
It is the perfect tranquillity of God's pure activity that the stars in their
courses seek to emulate. The celestial spheres, ranging from the constella-
tions down to our small sphere inside the path of the moon, seek to be as
nearly like God in His changelessness as imperfect beings can ever be. And
we in our fashion must seek our fulfillment in essentially the. same way: to
be as fully as possible what in our own rank in the natural order we are and
can be. For man it is reason that differentiates him from the other animals.
Hence, the fulfillment of human nature and the fullest attainment of human
good is, for Aristotle, to be found par eminence in the life of devoted reason:
a life of undistracted efcopia, vision, as nearly as possible like the vision that
God has and is. But the practical life to which most men are inescapably
committed can approximate this ideal by following always the way of mod-
eration - neither too much nor too little - in all sorts of emotional response.
There are many rungs on the ladder, and on each it is best to aim at the
changeless activity of God.4

40. This is assumed throughout the later dialogues, and given detailed "mythical" but
serious expression in the Timaeus. This world is purposefully ordered by an intelligent
"Maker and Father," who is good. TiMAEUs 28a-30a; etc. Cf. PHAEDO 99.
41. See especially METAPHYSICS Book Lambda.
42. NiCOMACHEAN ETHICS paSsiM.
 NATURAL LAW FORUM

When the Stoics picked up this theme, they made of it something in

certain respects radically different from what Plato and Aristotle had taught.
For both these men the ultimate goal is beyond Nature, but its lines of in-
fluence, so to say, percolate down through Nature to us men. For the Stoics,
on the other hand, the supreme principle is wholly immanent in Nature. It
is pervasive Law which is at the same time living Mind, the Steersman of
the universe. It can be called Destiny (Elpappv7)), as in ancient thought.
Most characteristically it is called A5yov, the Word, Thought, Mind, per-
meating the whole of Nature, and making the universe rational through its
whole expanse. Although in many respects the Stoic world-view recalls
pre-Socratic naturalism, it differs in affirming supremacy for a genuinely
rational power. This universal Logos is the source of reason in each human
being. Each of us as rational person is akin to the Mind that rules the uni-
verse, and to every fellow man. Each person lives rightly if he lives "accord-
ing to nature" (KaT& 4ovLv). This means first according to his own proper
nature, so that his rational power of self-direction stays uppermost, keeping
in control those passivities that sensation, emotion, and desire comprise. Life
according to nature is life according to my basic nature. But that is itself
determined by my kinship to Nature in the large. Hence the moral principle
is: Live so that you manifest in your behavior the true character of your
being, and the true order of the universe.
The Stoics called this "wise" life, moreover, life "according to law"
(Kara votlov); and its opposite, the life of folly, is "lawlessness" (dvoula).
Here at length, in explicit and endlessly reiterated expression, is direct con-
tradiction of the Sophistic thesis that v'w and ctr&9 are incompatible. In
effect the Stoics say: If you rightly understand what law is, you must see that
it derives from Reason in Nature; and if you rightly understand your own
being, you will see that it can achieve fulfillment only as it lives in accordance
43
with that natural ground.
I suppose the Stoics are, as nearly as anyone in pre-Christian antiquity,
the immediate source of the phrase lex naturae. They were followed by
successors of three sorts: Roman jurists, Hellenistic Jewish thinkers, and
Christian theologians. The Roman jurists are variously described as prac-
tical men for whom lex naturae meant a method of interpreting positive law,
and as genuinely philosophical theorists, for whom the term had essentially
its Stoic meaning. My knowledge is too meager for a confident choice be-
tween such views. Cicero, at all events, was both philosophically alert and
43. A convenient compendium of Stoic writings, mostly late, is in W. J. OATES ed., THE
STOIC AND EPICUREAN PHILOSOPHERS. The fragments of early Stoic writings have been
edited by H. von Arnim, and those of middle Stoicism by A. Schmekel. See also DIOGENES
LAERTiUS, LIVES VIII and E. ZELLER, DI PHILOSOPHIE DER GRIRCHEN III.
ROBERT L. CALHOUN

juridically daring in his view that human law is truly law only if it accords
with natural law as superior norm.
Among the first in a long line of Jewish thinkers influenced by Stoic and
Platonic thought is the author of the Greek Wisdom of Solomon in the Old
Testament Apocrypha. Like his predecessor, Joshua ben Sirach, author of
the Hebrew Ecclesiasticus, the author of Wisdom centers his thought on the
Wisdom of God, first -among created beings, by whom the order of the created
world is established and maintained. The earlier book identifies God's Wisdom
with the Torah (i.e., instruction), the Mosaic Law," and both authors re-
gard her as an ordering principle inwoven throughout the world, which she
helps God to produce. 4 5 The order thus effected should be a source for
right knowledge of God and a guide to right behavior. The worst wrong-
doing is that which idolatrously violates the order of nature. 4 6 This basic
mode of thought is embraced and greatly elaborated by Philo of Alexandria,
who relabels this Wisdom-theology with the Stoic term A'yov, and makes
it the central motif in his major effort to show the chief insights of Greek
philosophy in the Hebrew Scriptures. For him the true, essential Law is not
the Mosaic code taken literally, but the inner meaning of that code discover-
able by allegorical exegesis, and recognizable as the ethical content of the
world-order maintained by the Logos, as "divider," harmonizer, and sus-
tainer.47 The continuance of this philosophic tradition in Judaism, and the
impressive stature of such mediaeval Jewish thinkers as Saadia-Gaon,
Maimonides, and Crescas has become a familiar story. A distinctive sort of
natural law doctrine is one of the characteristic features of this tradition.
When Christian thinkers took over the theme from sources both Hellenistic
and Jewish, they not unnaturally set it into their own theological framework.
Like Philo they declared that the law of nature is ordained by the Creator of
heaven and earth, and related it in various ways to the Mosaic code and to
the A'yov of God whom they held to have become incarnate in Jesus Christ..
Whether St. Paul meant to affirm the traditional doctrine of natural law in
Romans 1 and 2 is debated. I think he did, in the way already indicated in
Wisdom 12 - 14, which he almost certainly used. 48 Stress on the "peace and
harmony" of the physical world as a model for human conduct, along with
the examples of righteous men, appears in the first century letter ascribed to

44. Ecclesiasticus 24:1-34, esp. 24; cf. 1:1-27; Wisdom 6:17-22.

45. Cf. Wisdom 1:1-8; 7:15-8:1; 9:1-11, 17-18.
46. Wisdom 11:21-12:2; 12:23-13:9; 14:22-31; cf. Romans 1:18-2:16.
47. Philo, de opilfcio mundi; Leges alleg., I-III; etc. For general accounts, E. R. GOOD-
ENOUoH, AN INTROD.UCTION TO PHILO JUDAEus; E. BREHIER, LA PHILOSOPHIE DE PHILON
D'ALEXANDRIE; H. A. WOLFSON, PHILO 2 vv.
48. Cf. supra, note 46; and notice especially Romans 2:14-15: "When Gentiles who have
not the law do by nature (06aet) what the law requires, &c."
 NATURAL LAW FORUM

Bishop Clement of Rome. 49 In the second century, Justin Martyr distin-

guishes within the Mosaic code "that which is universally, naturally (On'rlf),
and eternally good" from what is enjoined temporarily for the Jews alone;
and elsewhere he identifies "the eternal law" (aowtog v4to = lex aeterna)
with the incarnate A'yo .5 Tertullian likewise knows a "righteousness of
natural law" (naturalis legis iustitia), by which Adam, Noah, and Abraham
were judged, before Moses's day.5 1 Most interesting is Irenaeus, who thought
of the "natural commandments" (naturalia praecepta) of love to God and
to neighbor as "from the beginning . . . implanted in mankind." 52 These
naturalia legis, initially within man's created existence, define the condition
of his becoming a mature person, eligible for the gift of immortality, which
is not his by birth. At the same time, by comparison with the burdensome
ceremonial code, this original Law, renewed in the "new covenant" in Jesus
Christ, is a universal code of freedom, to give all men knowledge of God,
53
and so to enable them to reach their own proper stature.
Augustine in like manner uses this conception of the intrinsic and superior
order to which human life and human law must conform if it is to be what
it ought to be. Near the end of On the City of God he examines for the
second time a definition in Cicero's (now lost) De Republica. Cicero had
represented Scipio as equating res publica with res populi. The republic, the
commonweal as we should say, is nothing other than the welfare of the people.
But if we ask what he means by populus, the people whose welfare is in ques-
tion, he answers: "an assemblage bound together by common concern for
'5 4
right (iuris consensu) and by a common interest (utilitatis communione)."
Augustine's somewhat sardonic comment is: If this were indeed the correct
definition, we should probably have to judge that there has been no populus
and no res publica in the pagan world. It seems to him more realistic to
redefine populus in terms of common interest simply, and to agree that the
welfare of a people thus defined would indeed be a commonweal (res pu-
blica) .55 At the same time he really agrees all the while with Cicero's principle
that right (ius) is indispensable to a people's welfare. Some of his blunt

49. 1 Clement xix, xx, xxxmi.

50. DIALOGUE wrrIH TRYPHO xlv-xlvi; xi; xliii; cf. xxx; etc.
51. ADv. JUDAEOS ii. This is a law quae naturaliter intelligebatur, a law "general and
primordial." Ibid.
52. ADv. HAERESES IV. xv. 1; cf. III. xi. 8; IV. xiii. 1, 4. This primordial Law, the two
great commandments, is equivalent to the Decalogue in substance, though not external
in form.
53. Id. at IV. xvi. 5: "naturalia, et liberalia, et communia omnium."
54. DE cIvrrATE DEI XIX. xxi. In II. xxi Cicero and Scipio had already been quoted as
maintaining that a republic "cannot be governed without the highest degree of justice
(sine summa iustitia)."
55. Id. at XIX. xxiii.
ROBERT L. CALHOUN

words on this score have been quoted repeatedly: "If justice be absent, what
are kingdoms but large-scale banditries?" 5 6 Amoral rule is brigandage. If
it be not concerned for maintenance of justice and peace, government
(regnum) is not properly government at all. But who determines what is
justice? God, who is the Ground of all truth and of all right.67 Lex naturae
is the moral order of created being, ordained by the Creator.
So it was also for the Schoolmen, who follow in the main the lines that
the Fathers had marked out. Among the Scholastic doctors, it seems to me
that St. Thomas Aquinas is the one who gives the clearest, most succinct,
and in many ways the most suggestive account. 58 He specifies four primary
modes of law. The first is eternal law (lex aeterna), which is nothing less
than God's plan for the world, according to which His providential govern-
ment is carried out. Every created being is subject to this sovereign Law.
The second is natural law (lex naturalis), which is peculiar to the mind of
man. Whereas all creatures are subject to the providential rule of God, man
is able to recognize this fact, and so to become in a special way participant
in it. To the extent that he recognizes and affirms for himself the order which
God determines, man becomes a voluntary sharer in the fulfilment of God's
will for the world. Lex naturalis,therefore, is man's rational participation in
lex aeterna.
Thirdly, there is lex humana, the laws that men make in their efforts to
spell out what natural law demands in specific circumstances. Human law
may be the enactments of a particular government (jus civile), or it may
be a body of precepts more directly deducible from natural law and the
nature of man as social being, and, so, customary among many peoples (jus
gentium). In either case, lex humana is the product of man's empirical
effort to discern and to articulate an order which he sees but partially and
translates but imperfectly. Finally, there is divine law (lex divina), which
for St. Thomas means the regulations revealed in the Old and the New Testa-
ment as guides and helps to man's fumbling endeavors. In part this revealed
law is an explicit formulation of the natural law in some of its aspects, and
as such has universal and permanent validity for human conduct. In part
it consists of temporary and local injunctions for a particular people at a
particular time. In content, then, lex divina overlaps lex naturalis, and of
course lex aeterna. In form, lex divina as well as lex humana is positive law,
in the sense that it has the form of decrees promulgated at particular times,

56. Id. at IV. iv.

57. Id. at XIX. xiii-xiv; iv; XIV. iv. DE NATURA BONI i-XXiii. CONFESSIONES VII. xvii;
etc.
58. SUMMA THEOLOGICA IaIIae. qq.xc-cviii, esp. xc-xcvii, c, civ-cv.
 NATURAL LAW FORUM

whereas lex aeterna and lex naturalis are intrinsic to the being of the world
and of man.5 9
A distinctive feature of St. Thomas's doctrine is his view of the relation
between human insight and behavior and the natural law. Most generally
man is aware, as no other animal presumably is aware, that he stands in the
presence of good and evil, and that he is obligated to seek the one and shun
the other. This is an innate disposition (habitus) which distinguishes man
as responsible person. 60 But further than that, he is aware of some of the
specific injunctions involved. As substantial being he is required to persist
in his own mode of existence. That is true of all creatures, but man knows
it to be true of him. As animal he is subject to the law of reproduction ac-
cording to kind, and the duty of training his young. This duty he shares with
other living beings, but he knows it and can affirm it as his own. They cannot.
As rational being he is subject to the further requirement that he live in
61
society, and practice equity toward his fellow men.
Here are specific injunctions, indeed, but still injunctions so capacious
that any attempt to derive a precise legal code from any or from all of them
must be a baffling task. In principle, it seems to me St. Thomas was content
to interpret in clearly Christian terms, with increased sharpness of definition,
and with admirable sobriety of temper, a doctrine of human obligation which
in broad outline he shares with both classical and patristic predecessors.
From this calm balanced Christian doctrine of natural law, diverse and
mostly familiar lines of development and of reaction have followed. Within
the stream of ecclesiastical thought, it seems possible to distinguish three main
tendencies. One began with Ockham and strongly influenced his successors
d'Ailli and Biel, and then Luther and a considerable body of Protestant
thought: first to identify lex naturalis with lex divina (the text of the Scrip-
tures), and then in effect to replace natural law as a persisting system with
particular divine decrees. 6 2 Another tendency, closer to the habit of St.
Thomas, and characteristic of Calvin and of much Reformed and Anglican
thought, clearly affirms the reality of natural law, and presupposes it as a
general frame of reference for ethics, not identical with Scripture, without
59. There is a fifth mode of law, neither intrinsic nor positive but privative: a "law of
lust (lox6 fomitis)," characteristic of fallen man. St. Paul spoke in Romans 7:23 of "another
law (r pos) in my members that wars against the law of mind," "the law of sin." This
"law of the tinder-box," of concupiscence, can be called law only in a diminished sense:
it exerts control, but it does not embody right.
60. SUMMA THEOLOSCA I. q.lxxix. art. 12.
61. Id. at IaIlac. q.xciv. art. 2.
62. There is vigorous disagreement among Lutheran scholars concerning Luther's affirma.
tion or rejection of natural law. Cf., for a moderately affirmative view, E. TROELTSCH,
Dis SOZIALLEHREN DER CHRISTLICHEN KIRCHEN UND GRUPPEN 494-7, n. 225; 532-541;
etc. (1919); and in strong dissent, K.HOLL, GESAMMELTE AUFSXTZE ZUR KIRCHEN-
OESCHICHTE I. 43-252, 266, 281-7 (1932).
ROBERT L. CALHOUN

attempting to specify its content in detail, or to deduce from it particular

rules for conduct. 63 A third major tendency has been to develop detailed
ethical theorems from a natural law conceived in terms more specific than
those that St. Thomas used, or to make special applications of such a law,
as Vittoria and Grotius did in seeking a common base for international law.
Somewhat similar tendencies among secular thinkers, some defending and
some rejecting the doctrine, are sufficiently familiar to be taken here for
granted.
My own habit, as indicated more than once, is to affirm something like
the traditional doctrine in its more moderate form: a form that appears,
with important variations, in classical, patristic, Scholastic, and Calvinist
thought. It is time to define somewhat more closely the version I find per-
suasive, and its function (well known to the eighteenth century) as a bul-
wark of democratic theory.
First of all, what is in question here is genuinely law. It is not simply
an ideal, not an abstract value. It is fact, real structure rooted in existence,
an actual network of relationships entailing values and obligations. Neither
bare fact nor inactive ideal, then, but something like what Professor Fuller
and other participants in earlier symposia here have talked about: an order
of fact with dimensions in the order of value. 64 I should urge further that
it has polar or directional or directive character, that it can serve to guide
rational, appreciative, purposeful personal existence and behavior, even
though we cannot spell out in detail what this guide-structure is and involves.
In a complex situation with many values and disvalues, polarity or direction-
ality is itself a highly important character, supposing one can develop the
kind of sensitivity that will enable him to tell in which direction his actions
and his neighbors' are proceeding.
This presupposes, too, a relational structure that is not inaccessible to
men but progressively discernible through an inclusive sort of learning -
intellectual, esthetic, and so on - even though it is not completely com-
prehensible. It may be expected to present itself differently in different situa-
tions, now in one guise, now in another - as demand for integrity, endur-
ance, equity, or generosity; as promise or threat; as source of insight, of
embarrassment, or of reassurance. To think of it as a fixed rule of thumb
is to misconceive both its character and its value. In the Politicus, Plato's
Eleatic spokesman has been urging the need to recognize as vital to all sorts

63. Cf. CALVIN, INSTITUTIO (4th ed.) IV. xx. 14-16; RjcHARD HOOKER, LAwS OF
ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY intro, and Book I.
64. Cf. Lon L. Fuller, Human Purpose and Natural Law and A Rejoinder to Professor
Nagel, in 3 NATURAL LAW FORUM 68-76, 83-104 (1958); Joseph P. Witherspoon, The
Relation of Philosophy to Jurisprudence, id. at 105-134.
 NATURAL LAW FORUM

of skilled work the reality of true norms - "the just adequate" (70 /.e"Tptov),
by virtue of which the workman can avoid excess and defect. The question
arises: How can we distinguish a man who has requisite understanding of
the problem-situation from a man who does not? Shall we say the man who
invariably follows a standard course of action is the expert? No; we say
the expert pilot is the man who brings his cargoes in safely time after time,
even though he follows now one course, now another. With one combination
of wind and tide he can sail over this sandbar. At ebb tide or with the wind
in another quarter he must go around it - and he knows this. He displays
his understanding of what the situation intrinsically demands not by doing
the same thing every time, but by doing what, under varying conditions,
will get him where he wants to go. Do we recognize a skilled physician by
the uniformity of his treatments? Not at all. He will vary his treatments,
and he will cure his patients. Such a man has the kind of insight we are
looking for.65 If someone like Protagoras should object: But really what
you mean is that an expert is just a man guided by his own opinion, and
his opinion is really no truer than that of another, Plato's answer seems to
me conclusive: Surely some men's opinions are better than others' in the
sense that they work. If this be granted (as it is), and if we ask on what
grounds this fact is to be understood, it seems perverse not to say the man
whose opinion is successful time after time is the man who sees more clearly
66
what the actual situations successively demand of him.
When the issue is not simply technical but moral, we can paraphrase that
last clause and say one man sees more clearly than another what natural law
demands of him - natural law having the character of guide-line and bench
mark rather than detailed code or precept and being discernible as demand-
ing of us one mode of conduct in one situation, another mode in a different
one. But in every situation the basic demand is that we seek to see clearly
and to follow faithfully the ordering of being as it really is.
Plainly enough, that is a highly ambiguous sort of statement: What
being? What is the locus of this supposed superior law?
First and most obviously it is located in human existence itself. Here
I should venture a bit beyond what earlier contributors to the discussions
have urged: that if there be a guide-principle of this sort, it is to be recognized
especially in purposive action. 67 I would urge that it has its roots deeper, in
the very make-up of the human person. To be a person involves behaving

65. PounTcus 283c-285c, 295b-297a; cf. 293a-c.

66. THEZAETRTUS 161c-e; 167b-d; 170a-171a.
67. E.g., Professor Fuller in 3 NATURAL LAW FORUM 73, 74 (1958): "the collaborative
articulation of shared purposes." This is of course to be affirmed by one who defends
ROBRERT L. CALHOUN

as one subject to certain built-in requirements. In the second lecture I tried

to indicate, without attempting too fine detail, what some of these require-
ments seem to me to be. By my very nature I am obligated to seek my own
fulfillment as inseparable from that of my neighbor, performing my duties
in society with a view to the well-being of the whole community, seeking
always to know more clearly and accurately, ready to accept correction and
to offer it in the light of what I learn to see. In this perspective the purpose-
ful actions of men are rightly directed if, and as far as, they make toward
the fulfillment of man's essential being. The locus of natural law is in the
first instance within ourselves. The classical and Christian dictum that life
"according to nature" is life according to the real nature of human persons
is thus far, I think, on the right line.
Secondly; natural law is to be sought in the environing world, since man
cannot be separated out from his surroundings as an isolated entity. Indeed,
the requirements that emerge in man's own being must have got there
through his emergence in the larger whole, and throw some light on the
character of that whole. I should myself, of course, affirm the theological
understanding of the world and man in it. St. Thomas and his patristic
predecessors, and their unforeseen legatees in the American colonies, seem to
me right in seeing the intrinsic norms for human life as "the Laws of Nature,
and of Nature's God." But whatever one's view of theology, the higher law
is to be sought in both man and the world that gives him birth and life. It
is to be recognized, indeed, through both purposive action and positive legal
enactments that participate in it or exemplify it. Its proper being is to be
sought, once again, in what underlies purposive action and legal decision.
At the same time we must, of course, hope to find it manifested, both posi-
tively and negatively, directly and by contrast, in what men do and in the
rules they promulgate for themselves and their neighbors.
Finally, what are some of the ways in which this superior law can be.
discovered and recognized? I suggest three, and there may be many more.
In the first place, following again St. Thomas's lead,6 8 trial and error. We
find out what is demanded of us by making an attempt and discovering
whether the result is enhancement or damage. Secondly, systematic inquiry.
Detailed, tested, and cumulative knowledge of the make-up of man and
the world cannot be acquired without using the approved procedures of the

a doctrine of natural law, not as the primary locus of such law but as a manifestation of
its efficacy. Professor Fuller himself in another paragraph suggests something of this sort:
"The means-end problem is simply an outcropping of the deeper mystery of life itself."
Id. at 72.
68. SUMMA THEOLOGICA IaIlae. q.xci. art. 3, ad 1 et 3.
 NATURAL LAW FORUM

biological, psychological, and social sciences; and the results of such in-
quiries need philosophic as well as scientific interpretation. Thirdly, a more
controversial thesis, it seems to me that certain striking instances in the history
of mankind (what theologians call historical revelatory events) may throw
light on the character of the basic structure we are calling natural law.
Consider two instances of social order, each revealing vividly an aspect
of human existence. The Athenian democracy had a brilliant, brief, and
tragic career. Why? Thucydides and Xenophon leave little doubt of the
answer. 69 Individualism and popular caprice were rampant, in disregard of
both the Constitution and the common good, not to mention plain human
decency. Pericles himself, though moderate and generally wise, had turned
from the path of confederation with respected allies to imperialistic aggran-
dizement of Athens at the expense of allies successively reduced to resentful
vassals. After his death a populace frightened and hard pressed in a losing
power struggle fell willing victims to Cleon's demagogy and cynical im-
moralism, 7o curiously and injuriously commingled with blundering efforts to
keep Alcibiades's wayward brilliance in check. 7 1 The would-be oligarchs
were no better,72 and even the moderate leaders of the middle-class restora-
tion after the terror of the Thirty were unable to see the need for drastic
revision of political morality. Whatever one may think of Plato's hypothetical
Republic, it is hard to challenge his recognition that without a sense of the
overriding claim of the common good, no democratic society can last.
Consider by contrast the extraordinary persistence of the Jewish com-
munity, through centuries and under the most trying sorts of destructive
pressure. What the brilliant Athenians did not achieve, this people, likewise
brilliant, assertive, and venturesome, has achieved - too often under diaboli-
cal torture: a cohesiveness and vitality that serves as one kind of revelation
for one trying to understand the meaning of human life.
There can be revelation also in individual lives. Consider Socrates, for
one. When the Stoics wanted to make plain what they meant by "the wise
man," they set out some specifications and then said: Look at Socrates. If
you want to know the sort of life we have in mind, there it is. One can say
the same with respect to the greater prophets in Israel, religious pioneers
who put rectitude above taboo. One can say the same about Jesus of
Nazareth, who in his devotion to "the reign of God, and His righteousness"
makes plain the meaning of fulfillment through losing one's life to find it.
69. E.g., THUCYDmES, PELOPONNESIAN W~a I.xcvii seq.; cxiv-cxviii; II.xxvii; liii;
IIlxxxii sq.; V.lcxxiv-cxvi. XENOPHON, HELLENICA I.vii.1-35.
70. Tnucy-mDis, id. at II. lxv; III. xxxvi-xl; IV. xxi-xxii, xxvii-xxviii.
71. Id. at VI. xxviii-xxix, liii, Ix-ixi; VII. xviii; etc.
72. XENOPHON, HELLENICA II. iii. 11- iv. 1.
ROBERT L. CALHOUN 69

In these several ways - trial and error, systematic inquiry, response to

revelation - one can glimpse something of the character and the demands
of an intrinsic law deeper than human law. Democracy that has not
acknowledged it has fared badly hitherto, and it seens to me requisite for
democratic health.