You have full access to this open access article. This paper explores how a conception of the rule of law embodied in a variety of legal and political institutions came to affirm itself in the world of the ancient Greek city states. It argues that such a conception, formulated in opposition to the arbitrary rule of man, was to a large extent consistent with modern ideas of the rule of law as a constraint to political power, and to their Fullerian requirements of formal legality, as well as to requirements of due process.
The article then analyses how this ideal was formulated in the Archaic period, and how it became a key feature of Greek identity. Finally, it argues that in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE it came to be used as the measure of the legitimacy of Greek political systems: democracy and oligarchy, as they engaged in an ideological battle, were judged as legitimate and desirable or illegitimate and undesirable on the basis of their conformity with a shared ideal of the rule of law.
This global endorsement of the concept goes hand in hand with the belief that the rule of law produces a variety of social and economic goods, from human welfare to political stability and economic growth, and is therefore the key precondition for the development of a just and prosperous society. Footnote 1 And, because of this, scholars and governmental agencies alike use a variety of aggregate measures to test whether this or that state conforms to some of the conditions of the rule of law.
Footnote 2. The emergence of such a notion and of the related institutions has been explained by investigating a distinctive and for some historically unique historical process arching back to Western and Central Europe in the Middle Ages. Footnote 3 The argument is often made that the rule of law as it manifests itself in the modern political traditions of the West has emerged out of a distinctive historical process the roots of which are to be found in the Middle Ages.
Yet claims that the end results of such a developmentβideas and institutions of the rule of law as opposed to the rule of man that entail, at the very least, Fullerian notions of formal legality and the requirement that government officials are limited in their actions by the law whatever the definitional disagreements βare in any way unique, immediately sound problematic to the historian of ancient Greek law, politics and political thought.
