Is Politics Insoluble?

10 / Felix R. Livingston
ences in preferences and property requires the untiring
efforts of a ruthless tyrant.
For Aristotle, the rule of law "is preferable to that of any
individual." Every citizen among equals should have an
opportunity to rule and every ruler should be bound by consti-
tutional law. Aristotle warned that:
... he who bids the law rule may be deemed to bid Grod
and Reason alone rule, but he who bids man rule adds
an element of the beast; for desire is a wild beast, and
passion perverts the minds of rulers, even when they
are the best of men. ^^
Unconstrained by the rule of law, kingly rule becomes
tyranny, aristocratic rule becomes oligarchy, and constitu-
tional government becomes democracy. Aristotle contended
(as did Plato) that the most depraved of these perversions is
tyranny, toward which democracy moves in proportion to the
extent that the "people" are not bound by laws. Where laws
are not supreme, the "many in one" collectively become a
despotic monarch. "Demagogues spring up" and sway the peo-
ple in much the same way that flatterers influence tyrants.
And where "the laws have no authority," notwithstanding
existence of a written charter, "there is no constitution."
Jean Bodin
Constitutional law was virtually unchanged for nearly two
thousand years after Aristotle. In the sixteenth century, when
France passed from a feudal to a national state, Jean Bodin
changed the form of constitutionalism forever when he rede-
fined the scope of sovereignty and changed the justification for
exercise of its power. ^^ While Aristotle's political theory never