Is the Rule of Law Sacred?

It is not because preserving the rule of law is a French problem that it has no relevance for the United States. Quite the contrary. The current minister of the Interior, the top cop in France, recently declared (see Nicolas Bastuk and Samuel Dufay, “L’État de droit est-il sacré?” or “Is the Rule of Law Sacred?” in Le Point, October 10, 2024):

The rule of law is neither untouchable nor sacred. [Its] source is the sovereign people.

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

The classical-liberal definition of the rule of law can be borrowed from Friedrich Hayek. In his Law, Legislation, and Liberty, he identified it with

rules regulating the conduct of persons towards others, applicable to an unknown number of future instances and containing prohibitions delimiting the boundary of the protected domain of each person.

The rule of law is a “government of laws” instead of a “government by men,” as the standard formula says. The so-called “sovereign people” itself is only a group of men. Hayek believed that, in the long run, as opposed to political mobs, these general rules or laws necessarily come from the opinion of “the people”—which introduces some indeterminacy in the distinction between the rule of law and popular sovereignty. But like all classical liberals, Hayek was still adamant that the people must not be considered sovereign, that is, it may not hold supreme or unlimited power.

The idea that the rule of law is incompatible with the sovereignty of the people was forcefully expressed by Émile Faguet, a French literary critic and historian of political ideas, in his 1903 book Le Libéralisme (Liberalism):

[My translation:] If the people is sovereign  by right, which is exactly what the authors of the Declarations [the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and the one of 1793], the people has the right, being sovereign, to abolish all individual rights. Such is the conflict. Putting in the same declaration the right of the people and the rights of man, sovereignty of the people and liberty for example, at the same level, is like putting water and fire and ask them to please work out their differences. …

The authors of the Declarations, even of the less defective first one, were both democrats and liberals; they believed both in individual liberty and the sovereignty of the people. This led them to put in their work a fundamental 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 like the French constitutional writers, the American founders committed the same error, even if they were more suspicious of popular sovereignty; their descendants became less suspicious as time passed. The problem remains very relevant in today’s America.

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