Aspects of the Legacy of Positivism in Law

Abstract

The doctrines now known as legal positivism underwent their first substantial development in the work of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, although their roots can already be seen in the work of Thomas Hobbes and David Hume. Indeed, debates on some of the major themes that became prominent in legal positivism go back to antiquity. Some ideas that began to appear quite early in these debates are akin to ideas that, as I discussed in Chapter 6, arose in regard to the human sciences as aspects of the influence of the legacy of positivism. Thus, as I indicated in Chapter 7, in the juridical field these ideas developed to some extent independently of the influence of the legacy of positivism. However, I argue in the present chapter that more recently they have further developed and been shaped under the influence of the legacy of positivism.