Conceptualizing Politics

5.   The state and the law
It is a generally accepted doctrine that, while the state may or may not have goals 
to pursue beyond guaranteeing security and the minimal conditions for the citizens 
to thrive, it always has functions to fulfil, the first of which in the modern state is to 
make, adjudicate and enforce laws. This is the state on its performing side; in the section 
on identity, we have already encountered the basic standards of legality as one of 
the performances that allow for the legitimacy of an institution to become actual 
legitimation. On the side of the state’s foundations, we have seen that the original, 
albeit fictitious, covenant is enshrined in a constitution that defines the matter of 
the covenant (what state and citizens are owing each other) and the limits to state’s 
authority. In liberal democracies after 1945, the American model of a supreme court 
ruling over the conformity to the constitution of the norms passed by the legislative 
or executive power has spread as far as to the Russian Federation. The same holds 
with regards to the state’s epistemic existence: constitutional law acknowledging 
the fundamental rights of citizens has occupied the place taken in the old German 
academia by the state-centric discipline called Staatsrecht/the law of the state. Seen 
in historical perspective, the princeps legibus solutus est/the prince is not bound by the 
laws norm, issued by the Roman Senate in AD 69 under Emperor Vespasian, and 
revived by modern era absolutism has disappeared; even the most heinous dictators 
of our time try to wrap their deeds in some kind of a legal form.
The law seems, therefore, to be a defining element in modern politics, even 
more than it was in Cicero’s definition of the commonwealth. It gives it clothes 
(nearly all power comes in the form of laws), but it is also at the core of its operating 
and its legitimacy. The ancient dispute whether governance of the law (rex sub lege/
the king is under the law) or governance by persons (lex sub rege/the law is under 
the king) is to be preferred seems to have been solved in favour of the first corner, 
in spite of all personalization of politics in the media. In most states, law graduates 
are still the preferred candidates for positions in the public administration, though 
economists, philosophers and political scientists would often be better at solving 
problems and fostering innovation.
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 New conflicts or impulses emerging from 
social dynamics are often not recognised as long as they do not find expression 
and regulation in a legal framework: this is an aspect of the phenomenon called 
juridification.
In the following, I shall not ask how far statute law (of Napoleonic-Roman or 
Germanic-Roman subtype) and common law differ as to the relationship between 
the state and its law. In law systems, as in continental Europe, deriving from the 
Corpus iuris civilis and issued by the state, that relationship is most evidently closer, 
and I will now refer mostly to this case. There are qualifications to the notion of law 
acceptable as expression of the legislative competence of the state within the social 
compact: it must have a general and abstract nature, as such refer to all citizens without 

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exclusions or different treatments. Laws that under the clothes of generality are, in 
fact, tailored to a single situation (thus being an administrative measure
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 dressed as 
a law) are in principle not compatible with a constitutional system; even less so for 
laws, such as in racial legislation, that are conceived as exceptional measures aimed 
at excluding or disfavouring a single group of citizens. Totalitarian regimes excel 
in creating legislation of this kind, but the pure general character of the law is not 
completely preserved in all democracies either.
An analogue qualification must be specified with regard to the rule of law defined 
by the UN as
a principle of governance in which all persons, institutions and entities, pub-
lic and private, including the State itself, are accountable to laws that are 
publicly promulgated, equally enforced and independently adjudicated, and 
which are consistent with international human rights norms.
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This is the thick or substantive definition of the term, which also includes equal-
ity before the law, a principle already known to the Greeks as 
ἰσονομία/isonomy. 
In this version, rule of law means rule of the just law, including the protection of 
human rights. This makes it very different from its ‘continental’ pseudo-equivalents: