Beyond Natural Law and Legal Positivism: Toward a Marxist Materialist Account of Legal Normativity

Abstract

This article addresses one of the most persistent problems in legal and political philosophy: the question of what gives legal and moral norms their binding force and on what basis they can be critically evaluated. Two dominant traditions have attempted to answer this question. Natural law theory grounds the authority of law in universal moral principles that are assumed to exist independently of social life, whether in divine order, cosmic reason, or the rational capacities of human beings understood as supra-historical. Legal positivism, by contrast, explains legal validity in terms of social facts and institutional recognition, separating the question of what law is from the question of what law ought to be. Despite their apparent opposition, both approaches treat normativity as something that can be analyzed independently of concrete social relations: natural law by appealing to supra-historical moral foundations, legal positivism by reducing authority to formal procedural criteria. Neither adequately accounts for the historical variability of legal norms, the ideological functions of law, or the conditions under which legal authority may be challenged and transformed. This article argues that both traditions share a structural limitation: they abstract legal and moral norms from the material and historical conditions under which they arise, sustain themselves, and enter crisis. Drawing on Marx's historical materialism, the article proposes that normativity cannot be adequately understood without situating law and morality within the relations of production, class conflict, and ideological formation. It is the material production of goods that generates specific social relations, and it is within those relations that legal and moral norms acquire their determinate content, their apparent naturalness, and their capacity to be contested. A historical materialist account of normativity neither reduces law to mere power nor treats it as a transcendent moral order, but locates its force and limits within these historically specific relations of production---and in so doing provides grounds for a critique of existing legal norms that does not rely on appeals to eternal moral truths.