Chapter 5 The Task of Political Philosophy
It is not the intention of this book to expound or defend at length the philosophy of natural
law, or to elaborate a natural law ethic for the personal morality of man.
The intention is to set forth a social ethic of liberty, that is, to elaborate that subset
of the Natural Law that develops the concept of natural rights, and that deals with the
proper sphere of politics, that is, with violence and nonviolence as modes of interpersonal relations.
In short, to set forth a political philosophy of liberty.
In our view, the major task of political science, or better, political philosophy, is to construct
and the edifice of natural law pertinent to the political scene.
That this task has been almost completely neglected in this century by political scientists
is all too clear.
Political science has either pursued a positivistic and scientistic model building in vain imitation
of the methodology and content of the physical sciences, or it has engaged in purely empirical
fact-grubbing.
The contemporary political scientist believes that he can avoid the necessity of moral judgments
and that he can help frame public policy without committing himself to any ethical position.
And yet, as soon as anyone makes any policy suggestion, however narrow or limited, an
ethical judgment, sound or unsound, has willy-nilly been made.
The difference between the political scientist and the political philosopher is that the
The scientist's moral judgments are covert and implicit, and therefore not subject to
detailed scrutiny, and hence more likely to be unsound.
Moreover, the avoidance of explicit ethical judgments leads political scientists to one
overriding implicit value judgment, that in favor of the political status quo as it happens
to prevail in any given society.
At the very least, his lack of a systematic political ethics precludes the political scientist
from persuading anyone of the value of any change from the status quo.
In the meanwhile, furthermore, present-day political philosophers generally confine themselves,
also in a vert-frei manner, to antiquarian descriptions and exegesis of the views of
other long-gone political philosophers.
In so doing, they are evading the major task of political philosophy, in the words of Thomas
Thorson, the philosophic justification of value positions relevant to politics.
In order to advocate public policy, therefore, a system of social or political ethics must
be constructed.
In former centuries, this was the crucial task of political philosophy.
But in the contemporary world, political theory, in the name of a spurious science, has cast
out ethical philosophy and has itself become barren as a guide to the inquiring citizen.
The same course has been taken in each of the disciplines of the social sciences and
of philosophy by abandoning the procedures of natural law.
Let us then cast out the hobgoblins of Wertfreiheit, of positivism, of scientism. Ignoring the
imperious demands of an arbitrary status quo, let us hammer out, hackneyed cliché though
it may be, a natural law and natural rights standard to which the wise and honest may
repair. Specifically, let us seek to establish the political philosophy of liberty and of
The Proper Sphere of Law, Property Rights, and the State.