NATURAL LAW PARADIGM OF LEGITIMACY IN GENERAL LEGAL THEORY

Abstract

The article examines the natural law paradigm of legitimacy as the theoretically most developed alternative to the positivist reduction of legitimacy to formal validity. The aim of the article is to reconstruct the natural law understanding of legitimacy through an analysis of the key representatives of this tradition – Thomas Aquinas, H. Grotius, L. Fuller, J. Finnis, and R. Dworkin – and to determine the contribution that the natural law paradigm makes to the development of a general theoretical concept of legitimacy in general legal theory. It is established that the natural law tradition, despite its internal heterogeneity, is united around three foundational claims: first, law has an objective normative content that is not reducible to the fact of its enactment; second, an unjust law lacks full binding force; third, the legitimacy of a legal order requires conformity with fundamental moral principles. It is shown that justice and morality are not external criteria but constitutive conditions of legitimacy within the natural law paradigm. At the same time, fundamental limitations of this paradigm are identified: the risk of metaphysical dogmatism in classical versions, the problem of democratic legitimation of judicial discretion in Dworkin, and the question of verifying natural law standards under conditions of value pluralism. The results of the analysis lead to the conclusion that the natural law paradigm provides an indispensable normative-axiological dimension of legitimacy, without which no adequate general theoretical concept of legitimacy is possible; however, this dimension requires supplementation by the formal and sociological dimensions within a three-aspect model.