Un-claiming the world, because (1) ... there are no contracts

Last time I argued that we can claim a separate part of the world (a free and private sphere) if there is a valid law which distinguishes between lawful claims (as "needs") and unlawful claims (as "greeds").
So I suppose that the christian practice of un-claiming the world developed partly because there was no valid law in that time. Roman law (which e.g. allowed a Roman soldier to claim a jewish civilian walking with him for a certain, definite distance, but not more) was not seen as valid by Jews - and why ought they have it seen so? Jews had to decide for themselves if and how far thy accepted the Roman claims (and that seems to have been the situation the Sermon on the Mount refers to in its passage about walking with a stranger).

The general consequence I draw from that is that law can't be seen as valid only because there is a government or parliament which imposes it.
Neither can law be seen as valid only because there's a pope, bishop, synod or a theologian or philosopher who decrees it.

Law can not even be valid because there's an "inner theologian" or "inner philosopher" within us who decrees it. There need's more to be said about the inner light and its effect on us, but for the moment I raise only one objection: An inner light can stir my personal actions, but law is not personal but social.

So my answer is that a law is only valid insofar it flows from the light that the concerned parties share. In other words; a valid law is a (genuine) contract.

In some way that' a trivial answer. Contracts do just that: Each party allows the other one to lay claim to something and, in case of transgression, defend that claim.

The inventors of the "social contract" theory of state and society seem to have seen that - but "social contract" became soon a simple ideology which justified state and society as they were. Market economists were perhaps the only ones who earnestly insisted that contracts were a basic institution. (Sometimes even market economists may have been hampered by an inability to see the difference between a formal and a genuine contract - which I want to explain next time.)