Franz Neumann, the rule of law and the unfulfilled promise of classical liberal thought

This thesis draws on the work of Franz Neumann, a critical theorist associated with the early Frankfurt School, to evaluate liberal arguments about political legitimacy and to develop an original account of the justification for the liberal state.

Sparta and the English Republic

In 1659-60, James Harrington and Henry Stubbe, two republican authors, engaged in a bad-tempered pamphlet debate about the constitution of classical Sparta. This took place in the context of political collapse after the fall of the Cromwellian Protectorate, as republicans desperately attempted to devise safeguards which could prevent the return of monarchy. Questions of constitutional form were not always at the forefront of 1650s English republicanism, but Harrington’s ideal constitution of ‘Oceana’ brought these questions to the fore in 1659’s discussions. Sparta formed a key plank of the ‘ancient prudence’ which supported Harrington’s theory, and like Stubbe he drew on Nicolaus Cragius’ De Republica Lacedaemoniorum (1593) for evidence, and was attracted to some of the more apparently ‘aristocratic’ elements of the Spartan constitution. However, classical texts and modern scholarly authority, such as Cragius’, were not the only ingredients in the English version of the ‘classical republican’ tradition; sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political thinkers and current exigencies also shaped Harrington and Stubbe’s arguments. Both Harrington and Stubbe ended up challenging the scholarly and ancient consensus that Sparta was an aristocracy or mixed polity, Harrington reinterpreting it to assimilate it to ‘democracy’, and Stubbe attempting to rehabilitate a model of benign ‘oligarchy’.

Introduction: the legacy of Greek political thought

This Introduction offers context for the individual papers by examining the intersections and productive tensions between political thought and classical reception studies. While Plato and Aristotle have long been privileged interlocutors for political philosophers, classical reception studies has pluralised both this ancient canon and given rise to a more complex understanding of the modern heirs of ancient political thought. Similarly, the insights of studying the history of political texts and ideas across a longer tradition calls into question the fixity of concepts such as democracy, empire and political freedom. Indeed, we query the very notion of tradition by emphasising how the past has been repeatedly constructed and reconstructed in divergent modern political discourses and conversely how modern political theories and realities have been shaped and reshaped by an idea of antiquity. The Introduction closes with a brief survey of the collected papers.

The foundations of the rule of law

Formal conceptions of the rule of law are popular among contemporary legal philosophers. Nonetheless, the coherence of accounts of the rule of law committed to these conceptions is sometimes fractured by elements harkening back to substantive conceptions of the rule of law. I suggest that this may be because at its origins the ideal of the rule of law was substantive through and through. I also argue that those origins are older than is generally supposed. Most authors tend to trace the ideas of the rule of law and natural law back to classical Greece, but I show that they are already recognisable and intertwined as far back as Homer. Because the founding moment of the tradition of western intellectual reflection on the rule of law placed concerns about substantive justice at the centre of the rule of law ideal, it may be hard for this ideal to entirely shrug off its substantive content. It may be undesirable, too, given the rhetorical power of appeals to the rule of law. The rule of law means something quite radical in Homer; this meaning may provide a source of normative inspiration for contemporary reflections about the rule of law.