Cohen, D. (1995). Law, Violence, and Community in Classical Athens, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (ch. 3).
This chapter summarizes the differing views on the rule of law espoused by Aristotle, Plato, and the radical democrats of Athens, respectively. Aristotle proposed a rule of law predicated on the notion that the law is intended to protect the state from private licentiousness, and demanded that the law use "censorial magistrates" to regulate and govern private conduct. Plato insisted that citizens be propagandized into believing that law was a sovereign and continuing object, above and beyond the constitutive acts that brought it into being - going so far as to demand that citizens be taught to believe that the law is immutable and unchangeable. The radical democrats saw the rule of law as the mechanism whereby private lives were protected from state intervention.
Plato and Aristotle take the position that it is necessary to collapse the private and the public spheres into one, while the radical democrats insist that private life must be free from state intervention, where it does not impinge on another. Plato, in particular, demands that the rule of law include a "collective fiction" (or, as I prefer, a "collective delusion") that the Law is not a creation of man; whereas the radical democrats acknowledged that behind the sovereignty of the Law lay the power of the demos, or the "people out of doors" as Frank calls them.
My take: It appears that all three of the thinkers Cohen explores were carried over into the modern concept of the rule of law. Aristotle wants to tie the rule of law to mechanisms which regulate human excess, whether it be violent, sexual, or ethical - a common goal of lawmakers today, even if they disagree on the proper scope of that regulation or its appropriate mechanisms. Plato wanted to define the law as supreme even above lawmakers, which is consistent with the modern approach to constitutions that defines those constitutive actions as supreme and above the ordinary legislation created by constituted bodies. And the radical democrats focused on two things: first, the power of popular sovereignty, which remains a significant force in modern democratic theory; and second, the importance of protecting certain spheres from state intervention, in which can be seen the beginnings of a groping toward the modern institution of substantive democracy as a balance between the majoritarian impulse and the autocratic impulse - which requires the rule of law and judicial supremacy as the balancing act between them.