»Herrschaft des Gesetzes, nicht des Menschen«

The principle that laws and not people should govern is one of the ideas of the constitutional state. Yet this does not mean that this model first entered history with the conception of the constitutional state. Klaus Thomalla shows that talk about the rule of law is an essential topos in political philosophy whose foundations go back to the ancient world, late antiquity, and medieval times, permeating political philosophy's history of ideas like a cantus firmus.