Peter's observation on the "obedience = bad" crowd and the musings of another friend on the anarchists (or practical anarchists) in his law class started me thinking about this.
Back in the day, serious thought on law was more likely to be framed in terms of natural law, even if they didn't use those terms. To go back to St. Thomas Aquinas, the reason for the existence of law is to make men good. An unjust or outright wicked law is no law at all, properly speaking; it is a mockery or perversion of the idea of law. This was clearly understood when after WWII the Nazis clearly needed to be punished although they acted entirely within the laws that Germany had enacted for herself. Martin Luther King appealed to natural law in order to denounce segregationist laws. People acknowledged that there was a higher law according to which the legislation they enacted could and should be judged.
But of late it has become more fashionable to deny this truth and pretend instead that whatever the government enacts ("posits," hence "Positivism") should be the law; that any law is equally moral and right so long as the appropriate legislative body chooses it. This is variously dressed up as "choice" or "freedom" or "liberty" but is nothing other than the "freedom" to call injustice justice, or dictatorship under the guise of legitimate government. It is convenient for the sort of people who do not want to acknowledge that transcendent truth exists, or that other peoples' choices - or their own - might be wrong.
However, merely declaring that any law is equally valid law so long as it is chosen by the king/legislature/popular vote does not erase from peoples' hearts the sure conviction that some laws that governments enact are unjust (see the above examples - e.g. who will argue that the Holocaust was an example of good and just law?). Now if law exists for the common good and no law that is unjust is valid law, then to hate unjust laws is to love law, and to espouse anarchy is tantamount to a declaration of hatred of the common good and love of injustice. But - if all laws are equally good and some laws are clearly bad, then all law must be bad. Thus it is only natural for the philosophical climate of legal positivism to foster anarchist sentiment.
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