Divine Positive Law

In his essay on The Developmental Conditions of the Law, Max Weber highlighted the importance of the Western natural law tradition. Western natural law, Weber argued, has contributed both to formalistic legality and to substantive ethics, in ways that have been both revolutionary and constitutive for modernity. In this essay I propose that careful attention to Weber’s arguments in Ancient Judaism helps us to better understand the development of his thinking with respect to the Western natural law tradition. Rather than emphasizing the impacts of Stoicism, as he had earlier, Weber emphasized the importance of a covenantal conception of law. This covenantal conception, tying an actively willing divinity to his people, made the Western natural law tradition dynamic and world-transformative, a “divine positive law.”

Black letter law · Comparative law · Divine law · Divinity · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Modernity · Natural law · Natural order · Philosophy of law · Political science · Principle of legality · Private law · Sociology · Tying · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory