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

45The Sociology of Law vs. the Philosophy of JusticeWhether it was explicitly developed or tacitly assumed, thispremise explains why the economic analysis coming out of Scottishmoral philosophy cast lasting doubts on the tradition of rationalnatural law. With Adam Smith and David Ricardo, a politicaleconomy developed that conceived bourgeois civil society as asphere of commodity exchange and social labor governed byanonymous economic laws. Writing in the wake of political economy,Hegel called this civil society a "system of needs" in which individualswere robbed of all real freedom. Finally, as a critic of politicaleconomy, Marx saw in the anatomy of civil society nothing butstructures in which the self-valorization of capital proceeded overthe heads of alienated individuals in order to bring forth ever moredrastic forms of social inequality. The concept of civil society thusunderwent a transformation. Having begun as an ensemble ofauthorizing conditions that made freedom possible-conditionsunder which individuals could voluntarily and consciously join inassociation and bring the social process under their commoncontrol-it became an anonymous system independent of the intentionsof unconsciously sociated individuals, a system that followedits own logic and subjected society as a whole to the economicallydecoded imperatives of its self-stabilization.With this change in perspective effected by both political economyand the critique of political economy, the category of law lost itscentral role in theoretical analysis. The reproduction of social lifewas not only far too complex to be comprehended in the meagernormative motifs of natural law. The mechanisms of social integrationwere also, it now seemed, of an entirely different kind, namely,a non-normative one. Comprehending the anatomy of bourgeoissociety in terms of political economy had an unmasking effect:relations not of law but of production formed the skeletal frameworkholding the social organism together. Before long the medicalimage was displaced by the venerable metaphors of constructionand architecture: law belonged to the political "superstructure"resting on the economic basis of a society in which the rule of onesocial class over other classes was exercised in the nonpolitical formof the private disposition over the means of production. Therecursive process of the production and reproduction of exchangevalues thoroughly penetrated the social integration effected by