The History of Legal Philosophy

The hardback edition includes the two parts of Volume 1 of The Philosophy of Law, which were separately published as paperback editions.

The Rise and Fall of Natural Law

Our age is characterized by radical subjectivism. Which is to say: There is no agreement on any absolute standard of value. Indeed, there is no agreement even on truth itself.

The history of legal philosophy can tell us a great deal about how we got here. The key player in this history is natural law. Once the mainstay of ethical and legal discourse, it is now a forgotten relic. But natural law paved the way for the triumph of subjectivism in the modern world. A strange thing, considering that natural law was supposed to embody an objective standard for judging man-made law. It ended up eliminating that standard.

Natural law was born of the Greeks and Romans, adopted by the Christian church, and converted into the bulwark of Christian ethical and legal science. But along the way it became disengaged from the church; and when it did, it played a central role in secularizing Western civilization.

Stahl follows this career, from its start in classical antiquity, through to its incorporation in the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, to its secularized versions in the Enlightenment, and culminating in the philosophy of Rousseau and the hard reality of the French Revolution. The subjectivist turn is especially emphasized in the work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose focus on enthusiastic conviction and the primacy of the subject makes him the prophet of the modern world.

The Recovery of Historical Law

But that is not the end of the story, for history goes on. The Recovery of Historical Law narrates the attempts to overcome this radical subjectivism and establish a functioning social order in which the ideal matches up with the real, the theory is in harmony with the practice.

After discussing the work of Locke, Montesquieu, Constant, and the Doctrinaires, all of whom functioned fully within the framework of autonomous natural law while attempting to mitigate it, Stahl reveals the hero of the story: Friedrich Schelling. It was Schelling who initiated the gargantuan task of reorienting philosophy away from subjectivism and back toward truly objective reality. Stahl characterizes this as a "Samsonesque act" whereby Schelling "lifted the temple of the previous philosophy off of its pillars and buried the whole army of enemies, himself included, under its ruins." (Hence the cover illustration.) But Schelling's philosophy was an exercise in pantheism. Hegel, his great fellow laborer in so-called "speculative philosophy," took that pantheism and turned it into a mighty system in its own right. A rabbit trail that carried many into another dead end, one with which we wrestle today: "conscious" or "woke" big government.

Schelling's work was recovered by the Historical School of Jurisprudence. This is the foundation for Stahl's own system. It is on this basis that the laborious task to reconstruct Western civilization can begin. And not a moment too soon.

A Note on the Iron Cross on the back cover: The Iron Cross was instituted in Prussia during the war for liberation against secular imperialist France. As such, it was a symbol of Christian nationhood long before it was converted it into a symbol of German nationalism. The rendition presented here was the device on the masthead of the Neue Preussische Zeitung, the "New Prussian Daily," a conservative newspaper to which Stahl regularly contributed. The inscription reads "Forward with God for King and Fatherland!"