The Decline of the Rule of Law
11/11/2019Friedrich A. Hayek
Political wisdom, dearly bought by the bitter experience of generations, is often lost through the gradual change in the meaning of the words which express its maxims. Though the phrases themselves may continue to receive lip service, they are slowly denuded of their original significance until they are dropped as empty and commonplace. Finally, an ideal for which people have passionately fought in the past falls into oblivion because it lacks a generally understood name. If the history of political concepts is in general of interest only to the specialist, in such situations there is often no other way of discovering what is happening in our time than to go back to the source in order to recover the original meaning of the debased verbal coin which we still use. Today this is certainly true of the conception of the Rule of Law which stood for the Englishman's ideal of liberty, but which seems now to have lost both its meaning and its appeal.
There can be little doubt about the source from which the Englishmen of the late Tudor and early Stuart period derived their new political ideal for which their sons fought in the 17th century; it was the rediscovery of the political philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome which, as Thomas Hobbes complained, inspired the new enthusiasm for liberty. Yet if we ask precisely what were the features in the teaching of the ancients which had that great appeal, the answer of modern scholarship is none too clear. We need not take seriously the fashionable allegation that personal freedom did not exist in ancient Athens: whatever may have been true of the degenerate democracy against which Plato reacted, it certainly was not true of those Athenians whom, at the moment of supreme danger during the Sicilian expedition, their general reminded above all that they were fighting for a country in which they had "unfettered discretion to live as they pleased." But wherein did this freedom of the "freest of the free countries," as Nicias called it on the same occasion, appear to consist – both to the Greeks themselves and to the Elizabethans whose imagination it fired?
https://mises.org/library/decline-rule-law
