The Concept Of Natural Law Examination

A Servey of the Conception of Natural Law Guided by Marxism, the author makes a logical and historical investigation into the conception of natural law in the western political culture. Based on a vertical description of the development of this cultural phenomenon, the author puts this conception in the special time and space with cultural meanings, makesperspectives of it at the angles of culture, history, class as well as philosophy, a systematic study of the birth, growth and development of this conception, a primary description of the basic formations of this conception in various editions, and a deep analysis of its features and changing patterns. This treatise is made up of an introduction, four chapters and a conclusion, with about 145000 Chinese characters. In the Introduction, the author supplies a rough description of the changing clue and the level of natural law research both at home and abroad with the explanation of the methods as well as the aim for his research. His plan is to describe the development clue and the various formations of this conception, then to reveal its essence and changing patterns primarily. In the following four chapters, the author divides the history of this conception into four parts. Chapter 1 narrates its ripening course from its birth. The author concludes that, born in the ancient Greek philosophy of nature, and then through the criticism of the humanism philosophy, .3 especially of the Stoic, this conception came to its complete formation in Cicero theory; its foundation is the conception of nature mixed with pantheism; its main contents are the contradiction between human equality and unequality and some derived norms; reason mixed with divinity is the inherent spirit penetrating the ancient conception of natural law. Based on a brief generalization of the medieval conception of natural law in Chapter II, the author concludes that , worship of God, human equality and common ownership are the main contents of the medieval natural law; the theoretical foundation for this medieval conception is the Christian theology; defense of the theocratic order is its connotation; the medieval conception of natural law shows the characters of mixture and compromise; the state of nature is necessary for the explanation of the medieval conception; what worth our attention is ,from the 1 2~ century on, with the economic recovery in the European cities, the conception of subjective rights began to permeate the natural law, which started the transition of this traditional conception to its modem edition the change of natural law from its standard of duties to that of rights. In Chapter III, by a macroscopical grasp of the theories by the great thinkers in the west, the author comes to the following conclusion: the separation of the human reason from the worship of God and the discovery of personality are the cultural requisites for the change ?- 11. described above; the conception of natural law in the Renaissance and the Religious Reform is a transition of this conception from its medieval edition to the modem one; the demand of the capitalist class growing in the development of the commod...