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… is from page 331 of F.A. Hayekâs October 1973 Wincott Memorial Lecture – titled “Economic Freedom and Representative Government [2]” – as the text of this lecture appears as chapter 24 in the hot-off-the-press Essays on Liberalism and the Economy [3] (2022), which is volume 18 (expertly edited by Paul Lewis), of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek [4] (footnote deleted):
Legal positivism, the most influential current theory of jurisprudence, particularly represents this sovereignty of the legislature as logically necessary. This, however, was by no means the view of the classical theorists of representative government. John Locke made it very clear that in a free state even the power of the legislative body should be limited in a definite manner, namely to the passing of laws in the specific sense of general rules of just conduct equally applicable to all citizens. That all coercion would be legitimate only if it meant the application of general rules of law in this sense became the basic principle of liberalism. For Locke, and for the later theorists of Whiggism and the separation of powers, it was not so much the source from which the laws originated as their character of general rules of just conduct equally applicable to all which justified their coercive application.