Natural Order / Unnatural Order

Jan 1, 0001

The Byron Beers treatise corpus operates on a single master frame, repeated across all eleven treatises in some form: the American political-legal system has been converted from one underlying order to another, and the conversion is the operative fact the corpus then explains the consequences of. Beers names the two orders.

The natural order

The natural order, as Beers describes it, is a four-step hierarchy:

  1. God creates man.
  2. Man is endowed at creation with unalienable rights and the natural condition of liberty.
  3. Men create a state — a political body — by mutual constitution.
  4. The state creates a government of limited and delegated authority, operating through common law, jury trial, and other procedures that preserve the prior layers’ priority.

The framing draws explicitly on Justice James Wilson’s seriatim opinion in Chisholm v. Georgia, 2 U.S. 419 (1793), where Wilson argued that ultimate sovereignty rests in the people (individual citizens), not in the state as a corporate entity. Wilson’s framing was indeed faithful to natural-rights political theory of the founding period: “As the people are the source of power, so they are the source of trust.”

In Beers’s reading, the natural order corresponds to several features the U.S. constitutional system was originally designed to preserve: limited delegated federal authority, popular sovereignty, common-law procedures, jury trial, and a relationship between state and citizen mediated by mutual consent. The word “sovereign” does not appear in the Declaration of Independence — a textual absence Beers reads as deliberate.

The unnatural order

The unnatural order, on Beers’s account, inverts the natural order:

  1. Government claims precedence over the state.
  2. The state claims precedence over the people.
  3. People are reclassified as subjects of the sovereign government, with persons (legal fictions) as the operative unit of legal address.
  4. The operating procedural mechanism is positive law (legislated, enforced by sovereign authority), not common law.

Beers’s framework holds that the unnatural order is the system actually in force in America today. Its source is European feudal sovereignty — a foreign concept imported into American law via a specific historical mechanism. That mechanism is the second load-bearing claim of the framework, and it is addressed in the companion concept page on sovereignty-as-conquest and in the finding on the post-Civil-War permanent-conqueror claim.

The conversion event

Beers locates the inversion at a single historical moment: the American Civil War. The argument runs:

  • Before the Civil War, the federal government operated within its delegated constitutional limits (the natural order’s design).
  • The Civil War produced a “conqueror” relationship between the national government and the states.
  • That relationship was never legally terminated — there was no formal peace treaty.
  • Therefore the post-Civil-War United States operates under continuing wartime sovereignty: the unnatural order, now permanent.

The principal doctrinal anchor is Thorington v. Smith, 75 U.S. (8 Wall.) 1 (1868), which contains “conqueror” and “belligerent” language describing the relationship between the U.S. government and Confederate-occupied territories. The case’s actual scope and Beers’s use of it are addressed in detail in the companion finding.

Where the framework sits in the corpus

The natural / unnatural order binary recurs across treatises in different specific applications:

  • Treatise 1 (When There is No Money) treats the paper-currency system as a feature of the unnatural order, with citizens-as-creditors of the system on the natural-order reading and citizens-as-subjects-of-the-issuer on the unnatural-order reading.
  • Treatise 3 (The Natural Order of Things) develops the binary as the central thesis of that treatise, working out the implications across history (Roman empire, feudal Europe, post-Civil-War America).
  • Treatise 4 (Sovereignty) treats sovereignty as the legal-conceptual mechanism of the unnatural order’s claim to legitimacy.
  • Treatises 6, 9, 10 apply the binary to specific doctrines (positive law, citizenship-and-slavery, corporate political societies).

How Adverse Review treats the framework

The natural / unnatural order binary is a framework claim rather than a single testable proposition. The four-lens methodology applies to specific operative claims that the framework produces — for example, that no peace treaty after the Civil War means wartime sovereignty continues (a falsifiable historical-legal proposition), or that “person” in modern statutes refers only to legal fictions and not to natural human beings (a falsifiable statutory-construction proposition). Those operative claims are verdicted in the relevant findings; this concept page does not deliver a verdict on the framework itself.

What the page does establish is the vocabulary. When a finding refers to Beers’s “unnatural order” claim or to the “conqueror” reading of the post-Civil-War period, this is what the finding is referring to. The Beers corpus uses this vocabulary recurrently, and per-treatise findings will not re-introduce it each time.

Beers’s binary is sharper than anything in mainstream constitutional doctrine, but it is not unrelated to live debates in the literature. The relationship between natural-rights political theory and positive constitutional law has been argued continuously since the founding (Locke, Jefferson, Wilson, Story, then later Corwin, Hadley Arkes, Randy Barnett, others). The relationship between common law and positive statutory law is a perpetual topic in legal philosophy (the Hart-Fuller debate, the Dworkin-positivist debate, more recently the debates around originalism’s treatment of pre-existing common-law rights). Beers’s framework simplifies and sharpens these debates into a binary, then applies the binary as if the question were settled in favor of the natural-order side. The doctrinal sources he cites — Wilson in Chisholm, the Declaration’s word-choices, Thorington’s “conqueror” language — are real but contested, and the contests are alive. The framework is not an idiosyncratic Beers invention; it is a sharpened version of a real tradition. What it cannot do, on its own, is establish the legal conclusions Beers builds on top of it. Those conclusions live or die on their specific doctrinal moves.