PART SIX
‘Man is by nature a political animal.’
Aristotle
Politics is the study of how power is distributed and exercised, and how different groups interrelate, within a society. Though politics has been practised and evolving since humans first came together into communities. Groucho Marx called politics the ‘art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.’ J. K. Galbraith described it as ‘the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.’ Nonetheless, our collective aspiration to create happy and prosperous societies demands that we participate in political discourse and weigh up competing ideas.
Pivotal to our sense of what a modern, democratic society should be is the rule of law – the idea that all members of a society (including its lawmakers) should be governed by the same laws and should not be subject to arbitrary decision-making by any agency of power. In return, citizens are expected to respect and comply with that which is legally decreed, even when they disagree with it. By extension, the law and its instruments of arbitration (most obviously, the courts) should be accessible to ‘ordinary’ people.
Law is freedom
Plato may stake a claim to be the first great thinker on questions regarding the rule of law. Prior to him, many societies had operated on the principle that a ruler might wield power without being subject to the same laws as those over whom they had sovereignty. Plato thus argued for a system of rule by those best equipped to rule – a concept encapsulated in the notion of the ‘philosopher kings’. He also expressed a belief that the law should be ‘the master of the government and the government is its slave, then the situation is full of promise and men enjoy all the blessings that the gods shower on a state.’
His pupil, Aristotle, later observed: ‘It is more proper that law should govern than any of the citizens: on the same principle, if it is advantageous to place power in some particular individuals, they should be appointed only as the guardians and the servants of the laws.’ Cicero, the great Roman statesman of the 1st century BCE, reiterated Aristotle’s thoughts: ‘We are all servants of the laws in order that we may be free.’
One of the landmarks in cementing the rule of law came in 1215 when a posse of English barons compelled King John to sign the Magna Carta, enshrining certain legal rights in perpetuity in return for granting the sovereign tax-raising powers. Then, at the end of the 17th century, the English philosopher John Locke contributed his own influential thoughts on the subject in his Second Treatise of Government (1690), arguing:
Freedom of people under government is to be under no restraint apart from standing rules to live by that are common to everyone in the society and made by the law-making power established in it. Persons have a right or liberty to (1) follow their own will in all things that the law has not prohibited and (2) not be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, and arbitrary wills of others.
This may be said to signal the modern era of government by the rule of law.
In the mid-18th century the French Baron de Montesquieu published The Spirit of the Laws, in which he argued for the separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial authorities so that the judiciary may be able to execute the law without fear or favour. The ideas of both Locke and Montesquieu were highly influential on those who subsequently established the United States.
The British jurist Albert Venn Dicey was another high-profile advocate of the rule of law, proclaiming in the 19th century that ‘no man is above the law [and] every man, whatever be his rank or condition, is subject to the ordinary law of the realm and amenable to the jurisdiction of the ordinary tribunals.’ Today the rule of law is an accepted pillar of modern, liberal democracy – although its practical implementation remains a challenge in nations throughout the world.