Hello, I’m Zhan Qingyun.

This episode was not planned. After the previous two, I worried that using the social contract to explain legal society might leave the impression that rule of law arose naturally.

Locke makes voluntary entry into legal society sound like a natural, rational choice.

Human civilization has possessed laws for a very long time and written codes for more than four thousand years.

But rule of law has a short history. The phrase first appeared in sixteenth- or seventeenth-century England, and the first modern rule-of-law state emerged only after the Glorious Revolution and subsequent reforms—barely three centuries ago.

Even England has wavered between personal rule and legal rule, violating legal principles especially during war.

Across those centuries, many countries have known rule of law only intermittently or never.

It is rare and fragile.

Chinese distinguishes two homophonous expressions often confused: fazhi as a legal system and fazhi as legal governance. This series means the latter.

In the first, law controls people as a ruler’s instrument and remains personal rule in essence.

In the second, governance through law is centered not on ordinary people’s obedience but on constraining power itself.

Popular authorization grounds legislation; law governs the state; limiting power is the institution’s core.

History has often contained legal systems as elements of rule, but rarely genuine rule of law that binds power.

The idea of law governing power appeared very early.

Plato and Aristotle discussed it, as did thinkers in ancient Rome and pre-Qin China.

Plato famously classified constitutions by how many people ruled.

Rule by one was monarchy, by a small group oligarchy, and by the people democracy.

He then divided these three into six according to whether the ruler—one, few, or all—was bound by law: kingship, aristocracy, polity, tyranny, oligarchy, and mob rule.

Plato preferred the philosopher-king, but in an age without one he favored government power restrained by law.

Turning that thought into reality took a very long time. For most of history, law was merely a ruler’s tool.