Between Facts and Norms - Contributions to a ... - Blogs Unpad

44Chapter 2and john Millar, still standing between classical politics and contemporarypolitical economy, were just beginning the move fromAristotle to Marx.2 As empiricists, they opposed the prescriptivismofa rational law whose normative arguments disregarded historicalparticularity and sociocultural facts. As early sociologists and anthropologists,they opposed a rationalism that would neatly resolvethe informal fabric of received social relations, established institutions,deeply anchored interest positions, and class structures in adeliberately constructed system of rules.To be sure, the model of the social contract found support in theevidence that modern exchange society seemed to secure somethinglike a natural autonomy and equality for private personsthrough their participation in market transactions. With its spontaneoustendency to guarantee freedom, the only thing bourgeoiseconomic society (or civil society, burgerlichen Gesellschaft) stillseemed to lack was establishment in formal legal terms. True, thisintuition was explicated only in the liberal versions found in johnLocke through Immanuel Kant and Thomas Paine.3 But in allsocial-contract theories, the intention of constructing basic institutionsalong the lines of rational natural law amounted to the viewthat society as a whole could be understood as the intentional. complex of a free association of originally autonomous and equalmembers.4 This improbable idea gained a certain plausibility onlybecause modern market societies initially appeared as a naturalbasis on which parties encounter one another as inherently freeand equal. Why "inherently"? Under the egalitarian conditions ofan equilibrated, small-scale, commodity economy (as Marx will callit), commodity owners-who were imagined as male heads ofhousehold-already seemed virtually to occupy the position ofprivately autonomous subjects of law, prior to all intentionallyproduced political association. Certainly this background was lessimportant in those authors who characterized the state of naturenot in terms of economic relations but of power. Still, Hobbesianconstructions of the state of nature were at least equivalent to thesupposition that bourgeois society functioned, prior to all legalregulation, as the source of political association. It could serve thisfunction because competitive economic relations already requiresubjects who conclude contracts and to this extent make law.