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> It was pretty much invented by the English. Let me guess... you are English? Seriously, the English did not invent the notion that leaders are to be held acc

• vinceguidry 11y ago
  The Romans tried, and got close, to actually implementing rule of law. But they failed. It was an idea before its time. As I said before, it's not hard to dream up the idea and to try to implement it. What makes the difference is follow-through. Now, the Romans implemented a great deal of political reforms aimed at democratizing power and, most impressively, provided for peaceful transfer of power. But the descent into tyranny renders all that moot. The world just wasn't ready for rule of law anywhere, I think very few citizens actually trusted law even though they were excited by the possibilities. They could pass laws dividing up power, but that doesn't mean that the people holding that power would respect the law just because it was passed. When the English implemented it, they stuck to it and never went back. The English respect laws in ways that few do today, except perhaps Germany. Pre-WWII Germany is a great example of what rule of law isn't. If your elected leaders can significantly alter those laws such as to allow a dictatorship to take over, you don't have full rule of law. It's not just the written laws on the books. If they get ignored and nobody can enforce them, it's not rule of law. The whole society has to participate in protecting it. It's why we say Edison invented the light bulb even though he wasn't the first to come up with the idea. Having an idea isn't enough. And no, I'm American.
  • olavk 11y ago
    So at what point in time do you believe that the English implemented rule of law fully and never went back? Honestly your argument seem quite hand-wavy. How would you precisely define rule-of-law in such a way that you can decide if a particular system is rule-of-law or not? Why is England rule-of-law and say pre-christian Iceland not?
    • vinceguidry 11y ago
      As with all such developments, it was a gradual process. The English fought with their monarchs for hundreds of years, culminating in the Magna Carta, which was the turning point in the political struggle. Being a charter, it had to be renewed every year. With an actual document to rally around, the English nobility came to expect it would be ratified by each new king and so they each dutifully did at the beginning of their reigns. Eventually a mythic cult-like element came to surround the charter, and the idea of its repeal seemed more and more remote. The monarchy lost successively more and more powers and today mostly serves as a cultural symbol. > How would you precisely define rule-of-law in such a way that you can judge if a particular system is rule-of-law or not? The main lesson I learned studying history is that it's messy. Concepts take a lot of time to emerge. Eventually you have to stop calling something by one term and start calling it by another, otherwise important meaning gets lost. The Romans were really good at peaceful transfer of power, among other civic traditions. To easily refer to how they differed in that regard from the British Empire, the term at hand is 'rule of law'. The key idea of rule of law is that it's law that functions as the force guiding human action, not humans guiding themselves. What I see is that once rule of law is settled, the power struggles happen along other lines. People agree that the acceptable way to answer the question of "who should be the ruler?" isn't to go raise an army and go fight a war against your brother. So they fight about other things, like "how much and who can I tax?" Once the whole society says, "no more dictatorial kings", then you have that important part of rule of law handled and you can move on to other aspects. Now you have societies that never fully developed the bulwarks against tyranny that England did. They can be peaceful for awhile but at a bad moment devolve into totalitarianism. You could argue that it could happen in the UK, but the more you read about the history, the more laughable it looks. You could, with a large enough military, conquer the UK from the outside. Subvert its democracy from the inside? Never gonna happen. Attempting a coup in any state, especially a modern one, is not the work of one man, but is an act of violence against the entire legal and political system. The UK has the most robust laws and procedures of anywhere that decide what happens. If you slaughtered all of Parliament, they'd kill you and then go about electing a new one. Anything you'd try to subvert the UK political process would be met with an appropriate response by the appropriate people whose job it is is to protect the political process. It's the combination of all these factors that makes for rule of law. All these factors are required to protect a people from the people that hold power over them.