Republicanism and democratic rule of Law

outlines for a conceptual analysis

Abstract

In the contemporary political and legal thought, expressions like rule of Law, Democratic rule of Law and the word republic have been used with increasing frequency to address phenomena of the political and institutional life of the contemporary political societies. However, each of these notions is often used without the necessary conceptual precision, which makes it difficult to understand the institutional proposals formulated by the diverse political authors. Based on this observation, the purpose of this article is not to carry out a “conceptual genealogy” of the conceptions of the rule of Law, democratic rule of Law, republic or republicanism, but, in a much more restricted way, to extract from the history of political ideas some indicative parameters for understanding the concept of democratic rule of Law from the contemporary political thought, as well as its possible relations with republicanism. To this end, the article presents, in an introductory manner, the context in which the notions of republic, state and republicanism were formulated, in order to establish the possible contours of the contemporary conception of democratic rule of Law.