How should power be limited, and what can people do about an unjust ruler?

Punishment belongs to courts, never mobs — vigilantism is forbidden, and those who excommunicate and kill are a condemned sect. Oppression may be lifted by lawful war, never by private violence.

By constitutions, elections, independent courts, and a free press — no ruler holds divine right, so every authority is accountable and removable. Popper's test is the tradition's standard: judge a system by whether bad rulers can be removed without bloodshed.

No doctrine of the state exists, but the epistemology points one way: rulers who cannot be certain should not hold unchecked power. Agnostics typically endorse constitutional limits, open criticism, and lawful removal of bad rulers — arguments spelled out in the fallibilist political tradition rather than in agnostic texts themselves.

Power stands under God and is therefore limited: rulers are owed honor (Romans 13:1–7), but 'we must obey God rather than men' (Acts 5:29). On the next step Christians split — from patient endurance, to the Reformers' right of lesser magistrates to resist a tyrant, to Martin Luther King's nonviolent disobedience, arguing from Augustine and Aquinas that an unjust law is no law at all.

Even the king sits under the law: Deuteronomy limits royal wealth and requires the king to write and read a copy of the Torah, and the prophets' rebuke of kings — Nathan before David, Elijah before Ahab — is the tradition's model for confronting unjust power. No ruler stands above judgment.

By Dhamma rather than by institutions: the tradition lists ten royal virtues — among them generosity, morality, non-anger, non-violence, and patience — and holds that an unrighteous king brings ruin on his realm. There is no doctrine of rebellion; the classic instruments are moral counsel and withheld legitimacy, as when Burmese monks overturned their alms bowls against the junta in 2007.

The king was never the law's author: royal dharma bound him to protect his subjects, and the Mahabharata's statecraft chapters teach that a ruler who plunders his people instead forfeits obedience — one blunt verse says such a king may be slain "like a mad dog." The tradition's most famous modern answer is Gandhi's satyagraha: disciplined non-violent resistance as the dharmic check on unjust power.

Power must answer to justice, and tyranny may be resisted: the Gurus defied Mughal emperors and two of them died for it, and the Khalsa was founded (1699) precisely to stand against oppression. Authority inside the community is checked too — major decisions belong to the assembled congregation, and there is no priesthood.

Limiting power is the system's whole method: separation of powers, independent courts, elections, and entrenched rights no majority may vote away. Against an unjust ruler citizens have courts, the ballot, a free press, and lawful protest — and Locke, at the tradition's root, defended even revolution when a government destroys the rights it exists to protect.

By constitutions, separation of powers, independent courts, a free press, and regular elections. Against an unjust ruler: dissent, protest, civil resistance, and lawful removal — rights stand above every ruler, and no authority is sacred.

This is liberalism's founding question. Power is limited by separation of powers, elections, independent courts, and a free press; against an unjust ruler the remedies escalate — vote them out, sue them, disobey unjust laws civilly (Rawls gave the classic account), and, in Locke's last resort, a people may dissolve a government that has broken its trust.

By constitutional, democratic means — and feminism's founding demand was that women share those means: the vote, office, and the courts. Against unjust power its tools are organizing, litigation, protest, and elections.

It has no constitutional doctrine of its own. Its popular-sovereignty strand holds that rulers serve the nation and may be resisted when they betray it — nationalist revolutions were fought on exactly that ground. The honest record adds the opposite use: rulers have silenced opponents by branding them anti-national, a danger critics like Kedourie documented.