ABSTRACT
It is not easy to characterize Abraham Edel’s conception of philosophy. It is at once both conservative and liberal in perspective, insisting that much is to be gained by looking to the past history of our subject for new ideas and insights that can be fruitfully applied to our present concerns and problems. While Edel wants to show how the modes of analysis worked out within legal positivism suggest valuable supplements to modes of analysis worked out by naturalistic theorists, the author want to show that there is an actual agreement in a minimal area of significant importance. Historically, legal positivism has long been understood as denying the existence of such ontologically independent rights. Prelegal rights, accordingly, should be admitted only as values or ideals and assigned to ethics rather than to jurisprudence, or—in Kelsen’s view—as social Grundnorms which are subject to indefinite change rather than having any permanent status as natural law theorists were claiming.
