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Quotation of the Day…

… is from page 117 of Max Rheinstein’s 1960 essay “Process and change in the cultural spectrum coincident with expansion: government and law,” in Carl H. Kraeling and Robert M. Adams, eds., City Invincible (1960); this quotation appears on page 166 of the first volume (“Rules and Order,” 1973) of Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty:

The notion that valid norms of conduct might be established by way of legislation was peculiar to later states of Greek and Roman history; in Western Europe it was dormant until the discovery of Roman law and the rise of absolute monarchy.  The proposition that all law is the command of a sovereign is a postulate engendered by the democratic ideology of the French Revolution that all law had to emanate from the duly elected representatives of the people.  It is not, however, a true description of reality, least of all in the countries of the Anglo-Saxon Common Law.

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