a determinate source, but they have no legal or political sanction.
Closely connected with this positive morality, consisting of true
but not positive laws, is the positive morality whose rules are
not laws properly so called at all, though they are generally
denominated laws. Such are the laws of honour, the laws of
fashion, and, most important of all, international law.
Nowhere does Austin’s phraseology come more bluntly into conflict with common usage than in pronouncing the law of nations (which in substance is a compact body of well-defined rules resembling nothing so much as the ordinary rules of law) to be not laws at all, even in the wider sense of the term. That the rules of a private club should be law properly so called, while the whole mass of international jurisprudence is mere opinion, shocks our sense of the proprieties of expression. Yet no man was more careful than Austin to observe these properties. He recognizes fully the futility of definitions which involve a painful struggle with the current of ordinary speech. But in the present instance the apparent paralogism cannot be avoided if we accept the limitation of laws properly so called to commands proceeding from a determinate source. And that limitation is so generally present in our conception of law that to ignore it would be a worse anomaly than this. No one finds fault with the statement that the so-called code of honour or the dictates of fashion are not, properly speaking, laws. We repel the same statement applied to the law of nature, because it resembles in so many of its most striking features—in the certainty of a large portion of it, in its terminology, in its substantial principles—the most universal elements of actual systems of law, and because, moreover, the assumption that brought it into existence was nothing else than this, that it consisted of those abiding portions of legal systems which prevail everywhere by their own authority. But, though “positive morality” may not be the best phrase to describe such a code of rules, the distinction insisted on by Austin is unimpeachable.
The elimination of those laws properly and improperly so called which are not positive laws brings us to the definition of positive law, which is the keystone of the system. Every positive law is “set by a sovereign person, or sovereign body of persons, to a member or members of the independent political society wherein that person or body is sovereign or superior.” Though possibly sprung directly from another source, it is a positive law, by the institution of that present sovereign in the character of a political superior. The question is not as to the historical origin of the principle, but as to its present authority. “The legislator is he, not by whose authority the law was first made, but by whose authority it continues to be law.” This definition involves the analysis of the connected expressions sovereignty, subjection and independent political society, and of determinate body—which last analysis Austin performs in connexion with that of commands. These are all excellent examples of the logical method of which he was so great a master. The broad results alone need be noticed here. In order that a given society may form a society political and independent, the generality or bulk of its members must be in a habit of obedience to a certain and common superior; whilst that certain person or body of persons must not be habitually obedient to a certain person or body. All the italicized words point to circumstances in which it might be difficult to say whether a given society is political and independent or not. Several of these Austin has discussed—e.g. the state of things in which a political society yields obedience which may or may not be called habitual to some external power, and the state of things in which a political society is divided between contending claimants for sovereign power, and it is uncertain which shall prevail, and over how much of the society. So long as that uncertainty remains we have a state of anarchy. Further, an independent society to be political must not fall below a number which can only be called considerable. Neither then in a state of anarchy, nor in inconsiderable communities, nor among men living in a state of nature, have we the proper phenomena of a political society. The last limitation goes some way to meet the most serious criticism to which Austin’s system has been exposed, and it ought to be stated in his own words. He supposes a society which may be styled independent, which is considerable in numbers, and which is in a savage or extremely barbarous condition. In such a society, “the bulk of its members is not in the habit of obedience to one and the same superior. For the purpose of attacking an external enemy, or for the purpose of repelling an attack, the bulk of its members who are capable of bearing arms submits to one leader or one body of leaders. But as soon as that emergency passes the transient submission ceases, and the society reverts to the state which may be deemed its ordinary state. The bulk of each of the families which compose the given society renders habitual obedience to its own peculiar chief, but those domestic societies are themselves independent societies, or are not united and compacted into one political society by habitual and general obedience to one common superior, and there is no law (simply or strictly so styled) which can be called the law of that society. The so-called laws which are common to the bulk of the community are purely and properly customary laws—that is to say, laws which are set or imposed by the general opinion of the community, but are not enforced by legal or political sanctions.” Such, he says, are the savage societies of hunters and fishers in North America, and such were the Germans as described by Tacitus. He takes no account of societies in an intermediate stage between this and the condition which constitutes political society.
We need not follow the analysis in detail. Much ingenuity is displayed in grouping the various kinds of government, in detecting the sovereign authority under the disguises which it wears in the complicated state system of the United States or under the fictions of English law, in elucidating the precise meaning of abstract political terms. Incidentally the source of many celebrated fallacies in political thought is laid bare. That the question who is sovereign in a given state is a question of fact and not of law or morals or religion, that the sovereign is incapable of legal limitation, that law is such by the sovereign’s command, that no real or assumed compact can limit his action—are positions which Austin has been accused of enforcing with needless iteration. He cleared them, however, from the air of paradox with which they had been previously encumbered, and his influence was in no direction more widely felt than in making them the commonplaces of educated opinion in this generation.
Passing from these, we may now consider what has been said against the theory, which may be summed up in the following terms. Laws, no matter in what form they be expressed, are in the last resort reducible to commands set by the person or body of persons who are in fact sovereigns in any independent political society. The sovereign is the person or persons whose commands are habitually obeyed by the great bulk of the community; and by an independent society we mean that such sovereign head is not himself habitually obedient to any other determinate body of persons. The society must be sufficiently numerous to be considerable before we can speak of it as a political society. From command, with its inseparable incident of sanction, come the duties and rights in terms of which laws are for the most part expressed. Duty means that the person of whom it is predicated is liable to the sanction in case he fails to obey the command. Right means that the person of whom it is predicated may set the sanction in operation in case the command be disobeyed.
We may here interpolate a doubt whether the condition of independence on the part of the head of a community is essential to the legal analysis. It seems to us that we have all the elements of a true law present when we point to a community habitually obedient to the authority of a person or determinate body of persons, no matter what the relations of that superior may be to any external or superior power. Provided that in fact the commands of the lawgiver are those beyond which the community never looks, it seems immaterial to inquire whether this lawgiver in turn takes his orders from somebody else or is habitually obedient to such orders when given. One may imagine a community governed by a dependent legislatorial body or person, while the supreme sovereign whose representative and nominee such body or person may be never directly addresses the community at all. We do not see that in such a case anything is gained in clearness by representing the law of the community as set by the suzerain, rather than the dependent legislator. Nor is the ascertainment of the ultimate seat of power necessary to define
