Rechtsstaat
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Rechtsstaat is a concept in continental European legal thinking, originally borrowed from German jurisprudence, which literally means a "rule of law state" or "constitutional state". It is a state in which the exercise of governmental power is constrained by the law,[1] and is often tied to the Anglo-American concept of the rule of law.
In a Rechtsstaat, the power of the state is limited in order to protect citizens from the arbitrary exercise of authority. In a Rechtsstaat the citizens share both legally based civil liberties and they can use the courts. A country cannot be a liberal democracy without being a Rechtsstaat.
The concept of the Rechtsstaat first appeared in the German context in Robert von Mohl's book Die deutsche Polizeiwissenschaft nach den Grundsätzen des Rechtsstaates (1832–1834), and was contrasted with the aristocratic police state.
German writers usually place Immanuel Kant's theories at the beginning of their accounts of the movement toward the Rechtsstaat.[2]
Around the 1830s, the notion of political freedom took root in Middle-Eastern Muslims. Their concept of freedom owed much to the idea of the Rechtsstaat, and could be easily presented as a development of the classical Islamic concept of justice.[3]
[edit] References
- ^ Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, ch. 7; Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy
- ^ Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty.
- ^ Lewis, Bernard (2002). What Went Wrong? - Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. Oxford University Press, 56.
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