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The age old contest between the proponents of natural law and their opponents continues unabated, and a solution does not seem in sight. The reason, it seems to me, is simply that representatives of either side often quite literally do not know what they themselves, as well as their opponents, are talking about. Instead of arguing for their respective theories and against those of their antagonists, they knock down straw men. And since there are periodic "revivals" of natural law, and of its denial as well, the game continues endlessly. Yet, I believe it is sufficient to state the issue clearly to realize that the advocates of natural law adhere to an incorrect epistemological view, and that political thought must dispense with natural law because it is a mistaken doctrine.

1. "Facts." Jaffa holds value non-cognitivism (NC) to imply both "complete credulity concerning 'facts'" and "total skepticism" about facts. One and the same epistemological theory can hardly be akin to naive realism as well as to skepticism. NC implies neither. As an outgrowth of modern empiricism, NC considers concepts such as "man," "chair," "atom" as constructs, and statements such as "man is a political animal," "this is a chair" as hypotheses. Empirical hypotheses are scientifically meaningful if they can be tested, however indirectly, by observational data. Most of Jaffa's comments fail to meet this criterion of meaningfulness because they contain words such as "reality," "order of the soul," "man's humanity," "Justice," which cannot be operationally defined. "The objectivity of the external world cannot be demonstrated," Jaffa concedes. Then why talk about it? Physicists never "debate the nature of the universe" and never ask "whether it has objective existence." Physicists establish empirical laws in order to explain past and predict future events (not "reality"). Political scientists do the same—unless they turn metaphysicians.

When speaking of freedom, La Bruyère's word comes to mind—that everything has been said and that we come too late to add anything. Yet an analysis of the concept of freedom may be warranted for the very reason that it is being used by everyone to refer to whatever he considers valuable, from obedience to law (positive or natural) to autonomy and economic abundance. I believe that it is possible to assign to "freedom" in its different aspects meanings which are emotively neutral and operationally testable, and thereby to rescue for the social sciences generally and for political science in particular an important set of concepts, closely related as they are to those of power and control.One would have to start with disentangling the widely different senses in which "freedom" is being used indiscriminately. I shall deal with freedom in only two of its many meanings, interpersonal freedom and freedom of action. One of the difficulties will be to steer a middle course between the vagueness of conversational language and the awkwardness of a precise terminology; but I hope to demonstrate that such an endeavor is no idle exercise in semantics but a necessary prerequisite for the fruitful investigation of social and political phenomena.