ABSTRACT
Legal positivism is the name given to a great school of juristic thought, which includes such luminaries of philosophy as Thomas Hobbes, Jeremy Bentham, John Austin and Professor HLA Hart. The main feature of legal positivism is its insistence that the law of a society be identified purely by 'social facts' and that one does not need a moral argument to work out the content of the law - what the modern legal positivist, Professor Raz, calls 'the sources thesis'. The questions in the chapter include definitions of legal positivism, discussion of the 'command theory' of law, Professor Hart's restatement of legal positivism and the attack on the doctrine of legal positivism from Professor Ronald Dworkin. The highly influential German sociologist Max Weber said in 'On Law in Economy and Society' that in the modern age of the twentieth century, legal authority came from the application of consciously made 'rational rules'.
