Is the Rule of Legislation Sacred?

It’s not as a result of preserving the rule of regulation is a French downside that it has no relevance for america. Fairly the opposite. The present minister of the Inside, the highest cop in France, just lately declared (see Nicolas Bastuk and Samuel Dufay, “L’État de droit est-il sacré?” or “Is the Rule of Legislation Sacred?” in Le Level, October 10, 2024):

The rule of regulation is neither untouchable nor sacred. [Its] supply is the sovereign individuals.

L’État de droit, ça n’est pas intangible ni sacré. [Sa] supply, c’est le peuple souverain.

The classical-liberal definition of the rule of regulation may be borrowed from Friedrich Hayek. In his Legislation, Laws, and Liberty, he recognized it with

guidelines regulating the conduct of individuals in the direction of others, relevant to an unknown variety of future situations and containing prohibitions delimiting the boundary of the protected area of every particular person.

The rule of regulation is a “authorities of legal guidelines” as an alternative of a “authorities by males,” as the usual components says. The so-called “sovereign individuals” itself is just a bunch of males. Hayek believed that, in the long term, versus political mobs, these common guidelines or legal guidelines essentially come from the opinion of “the individuals”—which introduces some indeterminacy within the distinction between the rule of regulation and fashionable sovereignty. However like all classical liberals, Hayek was nonetheless adamant that the individuals should not be thought of sovereign, that’s, it could not maintain supreme or limitless energy.

The concept the rule of regulation is incompatible with the sovereignty of the individuals was forcefully expressed by Émile Faguet, a French literary critic and historian of political concepts, in his 1903 e-book Le Libéralisme (Liberalism):

[My translation:] If the individuals is sovereign  by proper, which is strictly what the authors of the Declarations [the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and the one of 1793], the individuals has the correct, being sovereign, to abolish all particular person rights. Such is the battle. Placing in the identical declaration the correct of the individuals and the rights of man, sovereignty of the individuals and liberty for instance, on the identical stage, is like placing water and hearth and ask them to please work out their variations. …

The authors of the Declarations, even of the much less faulty first one, have been each democrats and liberals; they believed each in particular person liberty and the sovereignty of the individuals. This led them to place of their work a elementary antinomy.

[Original French:] Si le droit du peuple, c’est la souveraineté, ce que précisément ont dit les rédacteurs des Déclarations, le peuple a le droit, en sa souveraineté, de supprimer tous les droits de l’individu. Et voilà le conflit. Mettre dans une même déclaration le droit du peuple et les droits de l’homme, la souveraineté du peuple et la liberté par exemple, à égal titre, c’est y mettre l’eau et le feu et les prier ensuite de vouloir bien s’arranger ensemble. […]

Les auteurs des Déclarations, même de la première, quoique moins, étaient à la fois démocrates et libéraux, et ils croyaient à la fois à la liberté individuelle et à la souveraineté du peuple. Ils devaient mettre dans leur œuvre une antinomie fondamentale.

Heirs of the Enlightenment just like the French constitutional writers, the American founders dedicated the identical error, even when they have been extra suspicious of fashionable sovereignty; their descendants grew to become much less suspicious as time handed. The issue stays very related in at this time’s America.

******************************