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@aral

I'm reading a book called The Rule of Law by @ChrisMayLA6 . I expected it to be a book laying out the liberal case for the rule of law, why it's good, blah blah blah.

In the fucking introduction, he blows that away. "The rule of law", he says, is a phrase that liberals use which they assume justifies itself and don't really examine further. Does it refer to laws being obeyed? No, he says, giving examples of cases where people condemn certain laws as being "against the rule of law." Rather, it's an ideological thing. It refers to the idea of laws, rather than to their reality. It cannot fail, only be failed, it is circularly defined, and it's vague enough for an advocate to invoke whenever they like while being too vague for a critic to nail down.

The rest of the book is about examining this using the tools we use to talk about ideologies, rather than about actual legal theory. I'm enjoying it and looking forward to finishing it.

He doesn't make the following comparison (so far as I've got) but I'm going to, because it stuck in my mind: liberals believe in "the rule of law" like Marxists believe in "the people." If a communist state faces opposition from its populace, then that doesn't mean that "the people" disapprove of communism; rather it means that the regime needs to repress the populace in the name of "the people." Similarly, a state which passes harmful laws which stunt personal liberty and economic development doesn't mean that "the rule of law" has failed; rather it means that those laws are against "the rule of law."

It's a god one can invoke to do the thing one needs to do to maintain power, same as any other god.