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SINCE PLATO, ALL TRADITIONAL DEFINITIONS OF THE NATURE OF THE various types of government have rested on two conceptual pillars: law and power. The differences between the various forms of government depended on the distribution of power, whether one single man or the most distinguished citizens or the people possessed the power to rule. The good or bad nature of each of these was judged according to the role played by law in the exercise of power: lawful government was good and lawless bad. The criterion of law, however, as a yardstick for good or bad government was very early replaced, already in Aristotle's political philosophy, by the altogether different notion of interest, with the result that bad government became the exercise of power in the interest of the rulers, and good government the use of power in the interest of the ruled. The types of government, enumerated according to the power principle, did not change in either case: there were always the three basic forms of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy and the corresponding three basic perversions of tyranny, oligarchy, and ochlocracy (mob-rule). Still, modern political thought is liable to over-emphasize and misconstrue Aristotle's conception of interest: dzên kai eudzên is not yet the rule that "commands the king" (as Cardinal Rohan put it much later), but designates the different concerns of the rich and the poor with which the laws ought to deal according to the principle of suum cuique. Rule in the interest of all, therefore, is not much more than a particular interpretation of rule in accordance with just laws.
A curious equivocality concerning the relationship between law and power has remained hidden in these well-known clichés. Almost all political theorists without noticing it use two altogether different similes in this regard. On one side, we learn that power enforces law in order to bring about lawfulness; on the other, the law is conceived as the limitation and the boundary of power, which must never be overstepped. In the first case, power could conceivably be understood as a necessary evil, whereas in the second case this role would much rather fall to the function of the law, which seems to owe its existence to the necessity of hedging in an otherwise free...