The Role of Law in a Fallen World

Last month's First Things, now available online, included a very interesting article by George Weigel on Catholic international relations theory. It's not remotely my area of expertise, so I leave assessing it to others who have studied these questions. Yet, I wanted to call attention to a particular passage that struck my eye:

Law is not self-vindicating or self-enforcing. Catholic international relations theory in the twenty-first century must take that into account in thinking through the relationship between “hard power” and “soft power,” and between the rule of law and the use of armed force, in international public life.

Being an adult convert, I come to Catholicism with the baggage of my Evangelical upbringing, which includes a strong emphasis on the Fall. As I observed in my article on Law and Economics in Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought, the Fall of Man tells a coherent story about the nature and origins of human preferences in an unredeemed world. I further argued that:

To be sure, Christians are called to a higher standard of behavior than that of fallen man. If the purpose of economic analysis is to predict how people will respond to changes in legal rules, however, can we assume Christian behavior by the masses of a secular and God-less society? No realistic social order can assume “heroic or even consistently virtuous behavior” by its citizens. A realistic social order therefore must be designed around principles that fall short of Christian ideals. In particular, the rules must not be defined in ways that effectively require every citizen to be a practicing Christian. Christian visions of Justice therefore cannot determine the rules of economic order. Instead, legal rules and predictions about human behavior must assume the fallen state of Man, which is precisely what I have tried to suggest Economic Man permits us to do.

Even since I crossed the Tiber, I have been planning on pursuing the Catholic version of the Fall and its corollary perspective on the perfectibility of Man, but haven't gotten around to it. What struck me about Weigel's statement thus was its apparent consistency with my own rather pessimistic view about the perfectibility of human nature and the resulting role of law in an unredeemed world. Perhaps the baggage of my Evangelical upbringing is not quite as irrelevant as I sometimes think.