Human history is full of formal pledges to equality, rights and rule of law. However, the lived reality has typically been the opposite: exceptions, privileges and uneven application of rules are the persistent pattern. Constitutions, codes and liberal ideals have repeatedly co-existed with concentration of power and the reproduction of inequality. What is proclaimed as universal has almost always carried within it an implicit hierarchy. The rule of law has thus appeared more as an aspiration than as a consistent political reality. History shows that exceptions are less anomalies and more the very structure of human governance.

Across epochs and civilisations, a familiar pattern emerges. General norms—whether proclaimed as king’s justice, religious law or constitutional rule—are announced as binding upon all. Alongside, a privileged class, whether nobles, clergy, colonial administrators, party elites or military leaders, has been granted immunities, discretionary power and legal exemptions. Over time, these exceptions became institutionalised: special courts, tax exemptions, patronage networks and emergency measures that were meant to be transitory but persisted long. Rule of law often functioned as a means to regulate and restrain those below the elite rather than those above it. Historical examples abound: coronations that affirmed the monarch’s justice but excused royal abuse; colonial regimes that enforced one set of laws for colonisers and another for the colonized; national security doctrines that suspend constitutional guarantees; and tax loopholes that protect corporations while ordinary citizens face strict enforcement. This recurring gap between the promise of equality and its practice has ensured that exceptions become the structural rule rather than the anomaly.

Several theoretical traditions help us understand why exceptions so consistently override the rule. Social contract thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau saw the state as a remedy for the chaos of nature. Hobbes famously described pre-political life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” and argued for the Leviathan’s authority. Yet, while individuals consent to authority in order to secure peace, there is no guarantee that authority binds its own agents. Rousseau’s lament that “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” captures the paradox: social contracts that claim universality often institutionalise elite privilege. Law here becomes less a universal shield and more a tool of selective enforcement.

Marx sharpened this point by declaring that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” For him, law was never neutral: it was shaped by and for the ruling class. What appears as a universal code of equality—property law, contract or constitutional rights—is in practice tilted to preserve the dominance of economic elites. Tax breaks, preferential contracts and property protections for the wealthy are not glitches in the system but features of how legal forms adapt to the needs of class power. In this reading, exceptions are not temporary departures but mechanisms of class domination.

Michel Foucault added a further layer of analysis by showing how power and knowledge are intertwined. Power does not only repress; it also produces categories of knowledge, regimes of truth and institutional practices that normalise exceptions as technical necessities. Declarations of a state of emergency, the categorisation of populations into “normal” and “deviant,” and the justification of surveillance as a security imperative all exemplify how exceptions are framed as rational, even benevolent, rather than political privilege. Where there is power, Foucault observed, there is resistance, but also the constant reconfiguration of what counts as lawful, normal or exceptional.

Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu deepened this diagnosis from a sociological perspective. Weber distinguished between traditional, charismatic and legal-rational authority. In practice, elites often blend these to maintain discretion and immunity. Even in modern bureaucracies that claim impersonal rule, discretionary power allows exceptions to flourish. Bourdieu showed that social and cultural capital enables privileged classes to navigate institutions differently. Equal rules thus yield unequal outcomes, as those with resources can manipulate them in their favour. His notion of “symbolic violence” illuminates how inequality is disguised as meritocracy, legitimising exceptions as natural advantage.

Legal realists and critical legal scholars extended this critique by rejecting the notion of law as mechanically neutral. Law, they argued, was indeterminate; outcomes depended on judges’ social positions, political forces and institutional interests. If law cannot be separated from power, then exceptions—selective enforcement, immunity clauses and special prerogatives—are structural, not incidental, to legal systems.

This interplay of power and law also reveals the ideological function of equality itself. Constitutions, declarations and rights have provided the moral and symbolic language that sustains legitimacy. They stabilise social systems by promising equality, even when such promises are rarely delivered. Two mechanisms are central. First, symbolic universality ensures that phrases like “all men are equal” mask real disparities, persuading citizens to accept a system whose benefits are unevenly distributed. Second, legal insulation embeds exceptions into constitutions through loopholes such as emergency clauses, immunity for officeholders and special courts. Orwell summarised this tension in Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” What appears to be equality in rhetoric is often hierarchy in substance. The persistence of exceptions is explained not by mere accident but by systemic forces. Elites have strong material incentives to preserve privileges such as tax relief, property protections and immunity from prosecution. Institutions ossify these incentives until they become normal features of governance. Temporary emergency powers, described by Carl Schmitt as the sovereign’s decision on the exception, frequently become permanent fixtures. Bureaucratic and expert discourse frames these privileges as technical necessities, masking their political content. Meanwhile, rights rhetoric and myths of meritocracy pacify resistance by promising upward mobility, even where structural barriers remain. In this way, exceptions do not simply persist; they are continually reproduced and legitimised.

Literary and philosophical voices across time echo this reality. Rousseau’s claim that “man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” exposes the tension between freedom and social subjugation. Hobbes’s vision of the brutish state of nature justifies authority, but authority itself becomes the source of new inequalities. Marx’s insistence on class struggle underscores the structural reproduction of privilege. Orwell’s biting aphorism about equality in Animal Farm highlights the hypocrisy of formal equality amidst substantive hierarchy. Foucault’s insight that power produces knowledge reminds us that even the very categories of exception are constructed to appear natural and necessary. These thinkers help us grasp why the proclaimed rule of law has been undermined so often.

It is important, however, to note qualifications. Progress has been achieved: slavery has been abolished in many places, voting rights have expanded, courts have occasionally enforced rights against the powerful and bureaucratic institutions have restrained arbitrary authority. These gains demonstrate that law can at times serve as a check on privilege. Furthermore, not all systems reproduce exceptions equally; some polities have developed stronger safeguards - independent judiciaries, free press, plural civil society—that make exceptions harder to entrench. Yet even in strong systems, war, economic inequality and concentrated power repeatedly produce new exceptions.

If exceptions are structurally likely, then remedies must be structural too. Merely proclaiming universal principles is insufficient. Institutions must be designed to limit discretion, reducing special immunities, strengthening transparency and ensuring that emergency powers expire rather than persist. Power must be diffused through checks and balances, independent courts and a vibrant civil society. Cultural and educational systems must be reformed to expose and dismantle the myths of meritocracy that naturalise inequality. Most importantly, redistributive politics must address the material bases of privilege that continually generate exceptions. Without tackling concentrated wealth and entrenched social capital, legal equality will remain a ruse.

Human history, then, reveals an uneasy dance between the rhetoric of universal law and the practice of special privilege. To say that exceptions are the rule is not to resign ourselves to fatalism but to recognise the structural tendencies that undermine equality. Unless citizens and institutions continuously resist the normalisation of privilege, the promise of equality will remain, too often, only a rhetorical exception rather than a lived reality. Orwell’s warning rings true: without vigilance, “some animals” will always remain “more equal than others.”

The writer is a professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.