The Idea of Natural Law

Abstract

Ever since men have thought about their mutual relationships, ever since “society” has been a problem at all — and this problem is older than any other topic of knowledge, even than that which we call ‘nature’ — the question of a just order of human relations has never ceased to be a burning one. And although this question has penetrated to the roots of our thinking and feeling and willing as scarcely any other has done, although the best minds, the most passionate hearts, the most iron hands have wrestled with it, although the whole of history, the whole unhappy history of mankind, can be seen as but a single constantly renewed attempt to answer this question, at a most frightful and infinitely costly sacrifice of blood, it is no more solved for us today than at the moment when this fearsome mystery of justice first flashed into a man’s mind, into the mind of the first man.

Zeitschrift für öffentliches Recht 7 (1928) 221–250