Rule of Law: A Historical Introduction’, in Pietro Costa & Danilo Zolo (eds.) The Rule of Law: History, Theory and Criticism (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 73–149; Martin Loughlin, Foundations of Public Law(Oxford: OUP, 2010), 312–41. 3 Loughlin 2010, 318. 4 Robert von Mohl, Die Polizei-Wissenschaft nach den Grundsätzen des Rechtsstaates (Tübingen: Heinrich Laupp, 1832), i. 14: ‘Auf der einen Seite nämlich ist die Freiheit des Bürgers die Grundlage des ganzen Rechtsstaates; er darf und soll sich nach allen Richtungen, in welchen er einen vernünftigen Zweck verfolgt und auf kein Recht eines dritten Stößt, frei bewegen. Der ganze Staat mit allen Einrichtungen ist nur dazu bestimmt, diese Freiheit zu schützen und möglich zu machen.’ 5 Loughlin 2010, 319. German liberal thinkers. Before him, Carl Theodor Welcker and Johann Christoph von Aretin had used it. All three used the concept to denote a category of states, namely the state governed by reason. In its turn, the discussion of such a category of states was based on the thinking of Kant. Mohl, however, had the more detailed definition of the concept. A Rechtsstaat consisted of three elements: governmental order as the product of earthly aims of free, equal, and rational individuals; governmental order designed to promote the liberty, security, and property of the individual; and a state organized rationally with a responsible government, independent judiciary, parliamentary representation, rule by means of law, and recognition of basic civil liberties.3 According to Mohl, the state is bound by the law and its actions can be tried in court. The state may not interfere with the liberty of a citizen against a law or without a legal foundation, ‘because on the one hand the liberty of the citizen is the basis for the entire law-based state, a citizen can and ought to move freely in all directions, in which he follows a reasonable purpose and does not infringe the rights of another. The entire state with all its agencies has as its only purpose to protect this liberty and make it possible.’4 This account of theRechtsstaat, with its purpose to secure the liberty of the citizen, can be discussed as theRechtsstaat in a material sense in contrast to the formal Rechtsstaat, which focuses on how the political ends of the state are realized.5 In the words of Friedrich Julius Stahl, the state was a state of the law, but more in the sense of what was common to its citizens than with their individual liberty in focus. Stahl agreed that the part vi • european legal integration • martin sunnqvist 288
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