Rule of law in the liberal tradition as political theology

The paper argues that besides the well-known political theology of sovereignty, underlining the conceptual analogies between the political sovereign in the theory of the state and God, or focusing on the secular reoccupations of theological concepts (in Hans Blumenberg’s sense of the word), nowadays mostly associated with the legal and political thought of Carl Schmitt, or more broadly, with the decisionistic thinkers, there exist less visible but conceptually and historically well established tradition of arguing in favour of the rule of law utilizing the arguments based on the metaphysical picture of the world. This paper will be devoted to identifying and discussing the importance of those motifs in classical modern political thinkers such as Locke, Montesquieu, or Rousseau. In John Locke the rule of men as opposed to the rule of law is tantamount to the contrast between the sheer will (voluntas) and the imitation of the order embodied in the universe (ratio). My aim is to show that the liberal tradition of the rule of law had been supported not only by purely philosophical-political arguments focusing on institutional solutions guaranteeing freedom of the citizens, but also by a kind of “constitutional metaphysics” that identified the structure of the universe, or even the nature of God, as favourable towards constitutionalized politics. This way of thinking has been often overlooked and subdued by other, usually more procedural, considerations. It is interesting that Hans Kelsen entertains in his pure theory of law the metaphysical ideas of pantheism that would provide at least conceptual framework for his anidecisionistic identification of the legal order and the state. So, in this paper I try to focus on modern metaphysical ideas underlying political-philosophical arguments in favour of constitutionalization of politics in its best known form of the rule of law.