The Great Tradition: I. Law and Power

Abstract

various types of government have rested on two conceptual pillars: law and power. The differences between the various forms of government depended on the distribution of power, whether one single man or the most distinguished citizens or the people possessed the power to rule. The good or bad nature of each of these was judged according to the role played by law in the exercise of power: lawful government was good and lawless bad. The criterion of law, however, as a yardstick for good or bad government was very early replaced, already in Aristotle's political philosophy, by the altogether different notion of interest, with the result that bad government became the exercise of power in the interest of the rulers, and good government the use of power in the interest of the ruled. The types of government, enumerated according to the power principle, did not change in either case: there were always the three basic forms of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy and the corresponding three basic perversions of tyranny, oligarchy, and ochlocracy (mob-rule). Still, modern political thought is liable to over-emphasize and misconstrue Aristotle's conception of interest: dzen Vai eudzen is not yet the rule that commands the king (as Cardinal Rohan put it much later), but designates the different concerns of the rich and the poor with which the laws ought to deal according to the principle of suum cuique. Rule in the interest of all, therefore, is not much more than a particular interpretation of rule in accordance with just laws.