ABSTRACT
The progressive critique of natural law in all of its facets had two distinct points of reference. The first was to found a new science of politics on the basis of the emerging science of evolution after the pattern of Charles Darwin. The second was to ground the critique of natural law in the study of history. The German historical tradition, if it did not make history a science, at least gave historians reason to believe that there were laws of history. German historicism thus led progressives to an unqualified relativism that further made any natural law political science problematic. The fundamental premise of natural law political science was the notion that mankind lives in a moral universe that is at least partly knowable through reason. The progressive abandonment of natural law was similar to Voltaire's remark that one did not have to be a mathematician to be a Newtonian.
