If you want to point to one main difference between president Putin and president Bush, it’s that Bush believes in the idea of natural law, and Putin doesn’t. This is the cause of a certain amount of tension between the two governments.

What is natural law? It is basically a political offshoot of the ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism. Stoics asserted that all humans have a divine spark of reason within them, which can enable them to attain inner freedom from troubling external conditions. This spark is part of a divine rational order that permeates the entire universe, which Stoics called the Logos. The Logos is the universal rational mind of God.

Roman thinkers influenced by Stoicism, notably the lawyer and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero, tried to extend this ethical philosophy into jurisprudence. Cicero suggests: “There is one, single, justice. It binds together human society and has been established by one, single, law. That law is right reason”. This law is the Divine Logos, which is the fundamental basis of reality. Therefore, the law is not a matter of opinion, but of nature. It is indisputable –“single and eternal and unchangeable”.

Because all humans have, as their birth-right, a divine spark of this rational Logos within them, then all humans, wherever they exist, are part of this natural law. It doesn’t matter if they are American or Arab or Russian or Chinese –“there is no essential difference within mankind”, asserts Cicero. “Reason is common to us all.”

Now, you might connect this all-embracing cosmic order with the Roman Empire, and equate the Logos with the Pax Romana. However, the two are not the same thing. The Roman Empire could contradict natural law, as indeed Cicero thought it did when it slid into tyranny under Julius Caesar.

In fact, the idea of natural law is much more radical than perhaps Cicero realized. According to the theory, a human law that contradicts natural law is, in Augustine’s expression “no law at all”. So natural law gives a philosophical weapon to generations of radicals, from Rousseau to Tom Paine to Thomas Jefferson, to over-throw established orders on the basis that they are in contradiction to natural law, and therefore illegitimate.

Bringing the debate up to our own day, natural law could even provide a justification for overthrowing an established order in someone else’s country, if the government of that country was in contradiction to natural law. This indeed is the basis of the idea of universal human rights, the idea that acts such as genocide go against natural law and can be tried internationally (as is happening to Milosevic), and even the idea that governments can legitimately force regime change in other countries, if those regimes contradict natural law.

The influence of natural law theory is obvious throughout the speeches of George W. Bush. He points to the divine spark of reason within us that gives us our rights - “[E]very man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and Earth.” He declares how this divine spark is part of a greater natural order of universal liberty - “Liberty is the plan of heaven for humanity.”

And he says that all humans, regardless of their cultural background, belong to this divine order –“Are the people of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty?…I for one don’t believe that.” Importantly, he also asserts that natural law is superior to conventional law: “We are defending the nobility of normal lives, lived in obedience to God and conscience, not to government.”

So this divine order of natural rights stretches all over the world, even into Eurasia, and those governments who deny their citizens’ natural right to liberty are therefore illegitimate, and could be legitimately overthrown.

When we turn to president Putin’s pronouncements, we see a very different philosophy, one that stresses the diversity of human institutions and aspirations, rather than their universality. Putin declared: “Russia will decide itself how it can implement the principles of freedom and democracy…taking into account its historical, geopolitical and other specifics.”

Thus Putin is disagreeing with the Ciceronian assertion that all humans are the same everywhere. He is instead suggesting that human laws, rather than being given to us from some universal rational source in the cosmos, instead grow out of specific historical and geographic circumstances – from the bottom up rather than the top down.

This is actually a more traditionally liberal view than Bush’ theory of natural law. The earliest liberal thinker, according to many academics, was Protagoras, a Greek sophist in the fifth century BC. He asserted that laws and society weren’t divine at all, as humans had believed for thousands of years. They were actually man-made. They were developed through history to cope with specific physical and social problems, as artificial ways of maintaining order and civilization. They were pragmatic, not divine.

And because they weren’t divine, they were subject at all times to dispute and rational enquiry. You couldn’t claim a law was better by appealing to some ‘higher order’, only by suggesting that it actually worked better in practice.

A later opponent of natural law theory, Thomas Hobbes, thought it was nonsense that man was by nature divinely rational. Life in the state of nature was “nasty, brutish and short”. Men formed societies out of brute animal necessity. The best form of society was whichever could preserve order – probably an authoritarian form.

Putin seems to take a Hobbesian position, when he says: “Democratic procedures should not develop at the cost of law and order, at the cost of stability, achieved with so much difficulty.”

I don’t have space here to go into which president’s theory is more attractive or legitimate. Nor can we here go into the deeper questions raised here – If Bush believes in a natural order of human rights, why isn’t America subject to it in the international criminal court, which Bush refused to ratify? Is the Logos merely equivalent to the Pax Americana, in his vision?

One could also make the point that Stoicism only ever said man had the potential for moral freedom, and that this potential could only grow from within, after long, hard training. This might suggest that you can’t force people to be free – they can only achieve it themselves. But such considerations will have to wait for another time.

Julian Evans is a British freelance journalist based in Moscow.

December 21, 2005