Doctrine of Natural Rights 105
reducing man to a mere part of nature. Both inevitably, and
of necessity, specifically disavow all conceptions of natural
rights and intrinsic justice; both make rights and justice
instrumental to the existence and survival of the State.
Finally, both rest upon the denial of the dogma of reason
in the cosmos and explicitly affirm the scientific irrationalism
of which I spoke in the preceding lecture.
It is not surprising, therefore, that, in so far as funda-
mental moral issues are concerned, both are one. Both not
only challenge Christianity and its distinctive moral values,
but both abandon equally the democratic dogmas bound up
with these values. Having abandoned the principle of rea-
son in human life, which is the essence of the Greco-Chris-
tian tradition, both find their ultimate sanction, as well as
their ultimate reality, in force—in the will to power which
threatens to become the fundamental belief of the modern
world. Force, not reason, is the ultimate in society because
for both philosophies it is the ultimate constitution of the
world.
B
Long before the modern dictatorships began to put so-
cialism into practice, Sorel, the French philosopher, pointed
out that socialism is incompatible with what he called “bour-
geois morality,” and that its establishment must mean a new
morality, a morality of the proletariat. Now I think history
has shown that this insight is fundamentally sound and that
any radical reconstruction of the economic order means, in
the long run, also a radical reconstruction of the moral or-
der. Radical reconstruction of economic life means radical
reconstruction of moral and spiritual life also. This has
been amply proved by the developments of Russian Com-
munism and German National Socialism. In both cases
there has been a fundamental reconstruction, not only of
law but of the doctrine of rights underlying the law.