Rule of Persons and Rule of Law

According to both Plato and Aristotle, in an Aristocracy, the best form of Government, laws are unnecessary, because all citizens never fail to act justly. But the contingency and ephemerality of the availability of 'the best' require recourse to more effective means to social stability. The most venerable of those means has been the Hereditary Monarchy, but recent centuries have seen, primarily in Europe and the Americas, the rise of the Rule of Law, usually under the rubric 'Democracy'. The pioneering works of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau cannot be fully appreciated in abstraction from their being proposed as alternatives to Hereditarism. Furthermore, their promotion, in the name of stability, of an increased impersonalization of Political Philosophy, is accompanied by a more strident rejection of Aristocratism--not merely is the latter usually impracticable, but, given the essentiality of the fallibility of Human Nature, it is Metaphysically impossible. But the wholesale elimination of the study of the Rule of Persons from Modern Political Philosophy is not merely theoretically misguided, but potentially malign. In even the most impersonal of Political entities in history, the United States of America, the Law constitutes only one dimension of the processes of Ruling. For, in the Executive branch of the Government, personal ability is of the essence, and the stability of Law is indifferent to any distinction between, say, the performance of a President who sets as national policy travelling to the Moon, and that of one who dishonestly and recklessly launches an invasion of another country. The Rule of Persons is as relevant today as it was 2500 years ago, and one of the aims of Evolvementalism is to provide a criterion for evaluating Executive performance--the degree of its promotion of Evolvement=the scope of its comprehensiveness=how wise it is. Thus, in a Phronetocracy, the Rule of Persons becomes meaningful once again.