The Rule of Law: Pasts, Presents, and Two Possible Futures

Abstract

The recent rise of the rule of law, from controversial legal ideal to unopposed international cliché/slogan, has rendered increasingly murky what the concept might mean, what the phenomenon might be, and what it might be worth. This article argues, nevertheless, that the concept engages with fundamental and enduring issues of politics and law, particularly the dangers of arbitrary power, and the value of its institutionalized tempering. The article seeks to support the rule of law ideal, if not all the ways it is invoked, by recovering some past thinking about and experience with and without the rule of law understood this way. The review criticizes current discussions for their temporal parochialism and their inadequate treatment of ideals and of contexts. It concludes with two pleas: a call for a social science that does not exist, and a suggestion that, in order to pursue its own ideals, the time might have come to move beyond the rule of law.