ABSTRACT
For twenty-five hundred years, political thinkers have been concerned with "democracy" as a form of sociopolitical organization. The concept, and ideology, did not become the subject of sustained popular discourse, however, until the nineteenth century. Rome's major contribution to democratic government consisted in the further development of the concept of constitutionalism and in the emphasis on law as a system of norms that binds the ruler as well as the ruled. The Romans' fascination with legal matters was a consequence of their attempt to identify a concrete basis for governing the far-flung empire. The starting point for both Locke and Rousseau was that before there ever was a government or a society, human beings lived in a "state of nature.".
