ABSTRACT
At this point, it is necessary to return to the concept of the Rule of Law and its relationship to particular forms of economic organisation and, in turn, to a market way of understanding the world. The Rule of Law, as we have suggested, rests upon a central proposition, namely, that in essence all human beings are equal. Thus, as essentially equal individuals, it makes sense to have laws which apply to us all equally. That we are rich or poor, male or female, black or white is less significant than that we are individuals equal in our ‘humaness’. This idea of essential equality is not unproblematic and it is often used to validate a very particular conception of the equal human nature that we are supposed to possess. We have argued already that what is distinctive about liberal capitalist society is its great emphasis upon individuality and private property (the two are clearly inter-related) and yet most of us, most of the time, do not see this as anything other than entirely natural. For us, the essence of human nature is to be found in assumptions which, without strong evidence, seem self-evident. Within Western capitalism, one finds such assumptions about human nature as the natural desire to compete, the naturalness of male aggression, the natural distinction between maleness (aggression), and femaleness (maternalism), the natural desire to accumulate wealth and to be ambitious. Yet, all of these assumptions are not merely functional for the continuance of our particular way of organising the world, they are also the very attitudes which distinguish us from others. And, as we saw, early anthropologists (see especially the example of the description of the Eskimo) were only too ready to declare defective those societies where other assumptions about human nature prevailed. Whereas for many peoples cooperation seems much more ‘natural’ than competition, caring for people in the society more ‘natural’ than ignoring or even exploiting them, and ensuring that everybody in the community had sufficient resources to live on and no one more than he or she could use more ‘natural’ than individual goals to obtain more resources than could ever be consumed, our ideology means most of us think the opposite. This, however, is less interesting than the fact that so many accept this individualist perspective as simply ‘human nature’, and as such almost of unquestionable truth.
