About the rights with which we are born: The radical natural law and the social justice from K. Marx up to neoliberalism

Abstract

The natural law is a overempiric law that does not owe his dignity to the legal norm than to the intrinsic qualities of a human being. This paper presents a different hierarchical position of the natural law in the critics of capitalism from K. Marx to our days and its different intonation as a superpositive framework of justice. One should analytically differentiate between (1) theoretical search for social justice in the philosophy of the natural law (K.Marx, M.Weber, G.Radbruch, L.Strauss, E.Bloch, Lj.Tadić) and (2) empirical identification of power relations that allowed or hindered social justice in the reality. The paper provides analysis of historically different relationships between positive and radical natural law in both the compressed 20th century epochal conscience and today’s neoliberal one. In addition, it compares role of the natural law in capitalism and socialism and differentiates between social justice from above and social justice from below. The first one is gratuitous, paternalistic and limited, the second one is radical and has to be conquered. Radical natural law should express itself as a fully developed social justice liberated from capitalism. Critic of social unjustice from the viewpoint of natural law has no practical effects in our days, and in spite of it, it is not anachronistic. [Project of the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, Grant no. 149005: Društveni akteri i društvene promene u Srbiji 1990-2010]

Keywords

• natural law
• positiv law
• social justice
• capitalism
• socialism