Naturist Utopia and Libertine Rebellion. Intuitive Laws in Conflict
Naturist Utopia and Libertine Rebellion. Intuitive Laws in Conflict

Summary/Abstract: Both naturists and libertines are examples of disobedient subcultures based onthe transgression of conventional normative standards. As such they had todevelop their own codes of ethics that could guarantee the safety of participants. Physical security is in the domain of general norms, while moral security under such risky conditions is a question of specific norms. Due to thetransgressive activity they sanction, and the specifics of their formulation, bothcodes represent systems of intuitive law (cf. Petrazycki).Intuitive law is expressed in spontaneous behaviour guided by legal intuitionand an individual sense of moral justice. It is constructed through awarenessof another person’s rights (obligation), and not only the individual’s ownrights (claim).Tension between naturists and libertines arises from the polar difference of theirmain goals. Naturists are disobedient to the norm of privacy of nakedness, butmaintain the common definition of sexual modesty. Through the ideologizationof their nudity as asexual, they achieved social legitimisation at the margin ofthe public beach. But libertines who unlawfully appropriate this margin arepublicly naked in a sexual way and this underlies their order. Analysis of thestructure of these orders reveals disobedience not only in regard to general norms,which led to the institutionalisation of alternative unofficial legal systems; it isalso a case of structured disobedience in the form of transgression from an existing transgressional code that makes the libertines doubly disobedient.

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