A fun thing to do is to go through different countries you're interested in and analyze how much of the rule of law each of them actually implements, rather than just professes to have. Laws and justice are such appealing notions that even tyrants feel the need to put the people they want to execute on "trial". Plenty of totalitarian governments have nominal "constitutions" that aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
I personally consider it a measure of how advanced and robust a society is. One should not think of democracy as "people having elections", but rather as a collection of different principles which society forces the people that would want to rule it to follow. Is there a functioning legal system? Is there a system for transfer of power? Is there a working constitution? The rule of law is an emergent property that rests on all of these things.
I can't think of any reasonable standard where England actually has subjugated the head of state to their laws and is also the first to have done so by that standard.
I mean, surely we aren't holding up the military purge of Parliament that produced the Rump Parliament and that Rump Parliament's creation of the "High Court of Justice" and its prosecution of the King as an example of the rule of law... At best, that would give the English credit for the creation of the revolutionary kangaroo court (and, even at that, it probably wasn't original.)
And, even if you were to credit that as establishing the rule of law (and certainly, a lot of the language popularly used -- e.g., in the US's own revolution -- about the relationship between the monarch and the law stems from that prosecution and the propaganda around it), you'd have to recognize that that was hardly a durable principle established in England, having been somewhat forcibly repudiated when everyone who participated it that was caught by the post-Restoration government having been executed for their participation in it.
It was tenuous when it was first established. It became less so over time. Nothing happens all at once. If the North Koreans suddenly decided they wanted to ape the rule of law and passed a whole bunch of laws and killed a bunch of people French Revolution style, I would hesitate to say that the new nation has rule of law for at least a hundred years, unless I lived there and could observe the process directly so I could ascertain whether they're moving overall towards robust rule of law or more towards modern Russian oligarchy.
From the Restoration to now the complete immunity of the monarch to civil and criminal law has been given; and its only in the mid-20th century that British law recognized some claims against the monarch's government being of-right rather than by-license.
The idea of the monarch being subject to the law was more of a momentary, fleeting, and swiftly violently repressed concept in English law that had already been generally repudiated in England itself when the idea got raised as part of the Revolutionary propaganda in some of England's American colonies a century later, rather than something that was tenuous when first proposed in England but which later became firmly established.
(To the extent Britain has made progress in the rule of law, accountability of the chief of state to the law is pretty much the worst place to look for examples; the bloodshed on both sides of that issue has led to most subsequent progress in the direction of rule of law focusing on making the monarch irrelevant to the law in anything other than a symbolic sense rather than accountable to it.)
Many, many important battles have been fought to change the nature of power between state and nation to form a real difference from the normal state of affairs. That is what I'm arguing is the real crux of the matter.
Let me guess... you are English? Seriously, the English did not invent the notion that leaders are to be held accountable to laws just as subjects. Just take the roman republic.
As I said before, it's not hard to dream up the idea and to try to implement it. What makes the difference is follow-through. Now, the Romans implemented a great deal of political reforms aimed at democratizing power and, most impressively, provided for peaceful transfer of power.
But the descent into tyranny renders all that moot. The world just wasn't ready for rule of law anywhere, I think very few citizens actually trusted law even though they were excited by the possibilities. They could pass laws dividing up power, but that doesn't mean that the people holding that power would respect the law just because it was passed.
When the English implemented it, they stuck to it and never went back. The English respect laws in ways that few do today, except perhaps Germany.
Pre-WWII Germany is a great example of what rule of law isn't. If your elected leaders can significantly alter those laws such as to allow a dictatorship to take over, you don't have full rule of law. It's not just the written laws on the books. If they get ignored and nobody can enforce them, it's not rule of law. The whole society has to participate in protecting it.
It's why we say Edison invented the light bulb even though he wasn't the first to come up with the idea. Having an idea isn't enough.
And no, I'm American.
Honestly your argument seem quite hand-wavy. How would you precisely define rule-of-law in such a way that you can decide if a particular system is rule-of-law or not? Why is England rule-of-law and say pre-christian Iceland not?
The monarchy lost successively more and more powers and today mostly serves as a cultural symbol.
> How would you precisely define rule-of-law in such a way that you can judge if a particular system is rule-of-law or not?
The main lesson I learned studying history is that it's messy. Concepts take a lot of time to emerge. Eventually you have to stop calling something by one term and start calling it by another, otherwise important meaning gets lost. The Romans were really good at peaceful transfer of power, among other civic traditions. To easily refer to how they differed in that regard from the British Empire, the term at hand is 'rule of law'.
The key idea of rule of law is that it's law that functions as the force guiding human action, not humans guiding themselves. What I see is that once rule of law is settled, the power struggles happen along other lines. People agree that the acceptable way to answer the question of "who should be the ruler?" isn't to go raise an army and go fight a war against your brother. So they fight about other things, like "how much and who can I tax?" Once the whole society says, "no more dictatorial kings", then you have that important part of rule of law handled and you can move on to other aspects.
Now you have societies that never fully developed the bulwarks against tyranny that England did. They can be peaceful for awhile but at a bad moment devolve into totalitarianism. You could argue that it could happen in the UK, but the more you read about the history, the more laughable it looks. You could, with a large enough military, conquer the UK from the outside. Subvert its democracy from the inside? Never gonna happen.
Attempting a coup in any state, especially a modern one, is not the work of one man, but is an act of violence against the entire legal and political system. The UK has the most robust laws and procedures of anywhere that decide what happens. If you slaughtered all of Parliament, they'd kill you and then go about electing a new one. Anything you'd try to subvert the UK political process would be met with an appropriate response by the appropriate people whose job it is is to protect the political process.
It's the combination of all these factors that makes for rule of law. All these factors are required to protect a people from the people that hold power over them.
If your system of laws is so weak that you can have such internal strife that a little bit of pressure from another country's king is all it takes to annex you, you don't have rule of law. Your civic institutions are supposed to be able to prevent these kinds of circumstances. It's the whole reason they're there, the primary role of the state is to protect you from other states.
So far we've identified these criteria, in order of evolution:
a) A tradition of civic participation
b) A strong state
c) Traditions and rules that prevent would-be tyrants from subverting civic institutions
d) Leadership that respects limits on power defined not by him, but by the nation
D arises out of the first three, if d fails to happen, then you didn't have a-c.
Republican Rome lacked c and therefore d. A and b protected them for awhile, but the tradition wasn't strong enough to prevent devolution into tyranny. Iceland lacked b, so even having direct democracy isn't really enough. You have to have both a and b before it makes any sense to have c.
Small states where everyone knows everyone else are bound by stronger ties than law. You have decision-making processes rather than machinery of state. Rule of law protects the weak from the predations of the strong, if you don't need it, then those institutions won't have a chance to become resilient through constant testing. The first serious challenge to your nascent state will cause it to crumble, as happened in Iceland.
States today tend to have b without a.
Republican Rome definitely had c and d for most of its time; they broke down in the Late Republic, but that just says that progress in the rule of law isn't a one-way ratchet. As, even you have explicitly acknowledged, it wasn't for England, either.
I think its a mistake to view "rule of law" having a "won" state. Like an Empire (another thing Rome and Britain have in common), rule of law is something you have -- as long as you can manage to actively maintain it. When you fail, its gone, and not easy to get back. And even the best efforts toward maintaining it don't have a 100% guarantee, so, over an infinite time horizon, gambler's ruin is a real concern.
Rome had rule of law, until it didn't. England has rule of law, until it doesn't.
England isn't the first to have had it, and England hasn't achieved some state where it is automatically self-maintaining and no longer a matter of concern.
> I don't see why that's so difficult to grasp.
Its not difficult to grasp, its just wrong.
This seems reasonable, but I don't believe this to be correct. As I outlined in the other thread continuation, it's not just about political machinations. It's also about the rest of society and the economy and the judiciary.
If you analyze those in turn, you can see why England succeeded and Rome failed. You don't have to limit your analysis just to certain select states that we consider to have it, you can also look at countries where the rule of law is non-existent or weak and see how those get threatened as well. You can look at countries where it looked strong from the outside then crumbled, and find out where the weaknesses were.
The main Anglosphere nations, in my view, have broken through to a critical point and no tyranny is possible according to current understandings. People can complain about how Obama or Bush or whoever is a fascist, but analyzed, the events complained about will bear no real semblance to the historical events they're trying to draw similarities with.
We could drill down, look at the fundamentals, connect all the dots to each other, I do this all the time in my spare time, but if you're holding on to an existing ideological viewpoint, it won't matter whether we do or don't.
Cromwell damaged English rule of law, but he didn't destroy it. He was able to dissolve Parliament but ultimately could not rule effectively without it. He had popular support of the army but could not fund it properly. The army would have refused orders to act as tax collectors so ultimately Cromwell was simply one more would-be tyrant in a line of English kings who had to limit his ambitions to foreign policy after being frozen out domestically. Which suits the nation fine because foreign policy is exactly what they want him to be pursuing. So long as the army is busy away from home, they're not free to terrorize the legislature or interfere with the political process.
Funding and taxation was a major reason why the English were able to implement rule of law first. A would-be dictator has to be able to enforce his whims, but cannot if the army won't follow his orders or is left to rot, unsupplied on the battlefield.
Parliament in Cromwell's day refused to simply do his bidding. That is a key necessity for protection against dictatorship. A mad tyrant can run around declaring things, but if nobody is listening to him, all he's doing is barking orders. Eventually, they made peace and Parliament offered Cromwell the crown, but he was a dedicated anti-monarchist and refused it, thinking of himself as a dictator in the Roman mold. Despite this, the tug of war between the legislature and the executive continued, just Cromwell managed to get the upper hand for awhile.
After he died, his son Richard became Lord Protector, and the balance of power swung back towards Parliament. "Richard was never formally deposed or arrested, but allowed to fade away. The Protectorate was treated as having been from the first a mere usurpation." The Council of State took back over and invited Charles I's son to claim the throne.
This is how it happens in rule of law countries. Coups do not have the desired effect, your power is going to be circumscribed anyway by tradition, law, and all the other politicians at play that you don't control.
Also you are using a lot of "no true scotsman"-logic. Cromwell wasn't a true dictator since he still had to struggle with parliament. But the same is the case with the Roman emperors. There was an ongoing struggle between the senate and the emperor, and for example the senate deposed Nero, which shows he wasn't a sovereign dictator.
Have you yet provide a concrete explanation of how, exactly, the claim that England had rule of law before other nations (either in a binary sense, or in a continuous sense where England consistently over some significant period of time had a greater degree of "rule of law" than anyone else) is justified?
Because it doesn't seem like there is anything really concrete here.
The continuous sense does exist, but you have to deeply analyze historical events to ascertain distinguishing factors. You have to have analyzed numerous other countries to see how they play out with different polities, different cultures, different geopolitical imperatives. How the Soviets used law, how the Chinese use it. People find all kinds of ways to collect power. Other people oppose them.
Things are cultural and not just codified. You can't just look at a collection of facts and make the determination. Politics is messy. The concrete sense you're looking for doesn't exist. I've laid out a lot of rationale and historical context to lay out what the terrain of rule of law looks like, how it's threatened, protected, and codified; and analyzed four different countries in four different time periods.
This is a lay hobby of mine so I can't claim any kind of authority here. I could understand if you disagree with my findings. But neither of you have offered up any substantive analysis of your own or your own definition. Just isolated incidents in history with no surrounding context. I try to provide that context and it seems like I'm talking to a brick wall. You can't just cherry-pick events and expect that to be very insightful, all people do when they do that is reinforce their existing beliefs.
All of these things are connected, they all contribute to rule of law.
Laws themselves, of course, are as old as civilization.
Religion is, as you say, older than civilization, but it is worth examining how religion worked pre-historically and after the rise of civilization, as they are very different. You can learn about prehistoric religion in the aforementioned Fields of Blood. Essentially humans have three brains, the basal ganglia, the limbic system, and the neocortex, all of which gives us various drives. Religion is the child of the neocortex and serves to make sense of the other two drive us to do.