This book traces the developments that established legal positivism as an almost insurmountable horizon in legal theory. It shows that modern positivism's enduring success is due to the gradual abandonment of its core position on law's moral indifference, which, paradoxically, renders it less and less positivistic. The book explains that we usually pay far less attention to what the law actually tells us than to the possible consequences of our disobeying it. It argues that if we try to take it at face value, we discover that the law expects us to comply not out of fear of the harmful consequences of disobedience, but because it is the law that tells us to do this or that that, at least, seems to be the law's claim. It asks, where does this authority over our lives derive from, and why should we take the fact that it is the law that tells us to do something as a reason to do it?
