Thirteen Political Theorists of Authority, Law and the State, from Confucius to Hans Kelsen

Traditionally dated 551 to 479 BCE, Confucius held that good government rests on the ruler's own moral example rather than on coercion. His call for the rectification of names asked that titles, roles and duties match reality, beginning with the ruler's own conduct.

Aristotle treated politics as a practical science aimed at the good life of citizens. His Politics sorted constitutions into six forms by whether one, few or many rule and whether they rule for the common advantage, and it asked whether it is better to be ruled by the best man or by the best laws.

A Confucian of the late Warring States period, Xunzi held that human nature is originally self-interested and becomes good only through deliberate ritual, education and law. That darker view of human nature later influenced the rival school of Legalism through his student Han Feizi.

Kautilya, also called Chanakya, is traditionally named chief minister to the Mauryan emperor Chandragupta and author of the Arthashastra, a treatise on statecraft, economics and military strategy. Scholars treat the authorship and dating cautiously, since the surviving text is widely thought to be a composite worked on over several centuries.

Al-Farabi, who died around 950, joined Platonic political philosophy to Islamic thought. In The Virtuous City he pictured an ideal state led by a philosopher-ruler whose intellectual and moral perfection qualifies him to guide the community toward happiness, much as the heart orders the parts of a healthy body.

In the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun described a cycle in which dynasties rise on asabiyyah, or group solidarity, which is strong among tribal or frontier groups and weakens as a dynasty settles into wealth and comfort, leaving it open to conquest by a more cohesive rival. He died in 1406.

Writing amid the French Wars of Religion, Bodin gave sovereignty its first systematic treatment in his 1576 Six Books of the Commonwealth, defining it as the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth, undivided and not subject to any earthly superior.

In De Jure Belli ac Pacis of 1625, Grotius argued that a natural law discoverable by reason governs relations among sovereign states even without a common earthly authority above them. That made sovereign equality, rather than any universal empire or church, the working assumption of the European state system.

The Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Ferguson gave the term civil society its currency in English political thought with An Essay on the History of Civil Society of 1767. He rejected the idea that individuals ever existed in isolation before society.

In the Elements of the Philosophy of Right of 1820, Hegel placed civil society as an intermediate ethical sphere between the family and the state, organized around the system of needs, market relations and legally regulated work.

Drawing on his 1831 tour of the United States, Tocqueville asked in Democracy in America how democratic societies could preserve individual liberty against the leveling pressure of equality. He saw voluntary associations as democracy's counterweight to isolating individualism.

Holder of the Vinerian Chair of English Law at Oxford from 1882 to 1909, Dicey gave the rule of law its classic modern formulation in his 1885 Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution: no person is above the law, and everyone is subject to the ordinary law administered by the ordinary courts.

Kelsen's pure theory of law described legal systems as self-contained hierarchies of norms independent of morality or politics. He wrote the 1920 Austrian constitution and sat on the Austrian Constitutional Court from 1920 to 1930, a tribunal built to concentrate judicial review in one specialised body.