A
Government is the body within a community,
political entity or
organization which
has the
authority to make and enforce
rules, laws and regulations. .
Typically, the term "government" refers to a
civil government or
sovereign state which can be either local,
national, or international. However,
commercial, academic,
religious, or other formal organizations are also
governed by internal bodies. Such bodies may be called
boards of directors, managers, or
governors or they may be known as the
administration (as in schools) or
councils of elders (as in churches). The
size of governments can vary by region or purpose.
Growth of an organization advances the
complexity of its government, therefore small
towns or small-to-medium privately-operated enterprises will have
fewer officials than typically larger organizations such as
multinational corporations which tend to have multiple
interlocking,
hierarchical layers of
administration and governance. As complexity increases and the
nature of governance becomes more complicated, so does the need for
formal policies and procedures.
Types of State Government
- Authoritarian – Authoritarian
governments are characterized by an emphasis on the authority of
the state in a republic or union. It is a political system
controlled by nonelected rulers who usually permit some degree of
individual freedom.
- Constitutional monarchy
– A government that has a monarch, but
his/her power is strictly limited by the government. Example: United Kingdom
- Constitutional republic
– Rule by a government composed of representatives who are voted
into power by the people.
- Democracy – Rule by a government where
all [citizens] are represented but power is held by the majority.
- Dictatorship – Rule by an
individual who has full power over the country. See also Autocracy and Stratocracy.
- Monarchy – Rule by an individual who
has inherited the role and expects to bequeath it to their
heir.
- Oligarchy – Rule by a small group of
people who share similar interests or family relations.
- Plutocracy – A government composed of
the wealthy class. Any of the forms of government listed here can
be plutocracy. For instance, if all of the voted representatives in
a republic are wealthy, then it is a republic and a
plutocracy.
- Theocracy – Rule by a religious
elite.
- Totalitarian – Totalitarian
governments regulate nearly every aspect of public and private
life.
The political philosophy of
anarchism
opposes government, and is not a form thereof—it is the belief that
governments are harmful and unnecessary.
Origin
For many thousands of years when people were
hunter-gatherers and small scale farmers,
humans lived in small,
non-hierarchical
and
self-sufficient
communities.
The development of agriculture resulted in ever increasing
population densities. David Christian explains how this helped
result in states with laws and governments:
The exact moment and place that the phenomenon of human government
developed is lost in time; however, history does record the
formations of very early governments. About 5,000 years ago, the
first small city-states appeared. By the third to second
millenniums BC, some of these had developed into larger governed
areas:
Sumer,
Ancient
Egypt, the
Indus Valley
Civilization, and the
Yellow River
Civilization.
States formed as the results of a positive feedback loop where
population growth results in
increased information
exchange which results in
innovation which results in
increased resources which results in further population
growth. The role of cities in the feedback loop is important.
Cities became the primary conduits for the dramatic increases in
information exchange that allowed for large and densely packed
populations to form, and because cities concentrated knowledge,
they also ended up concentrating power. "Increasing population
density in farming regions provided the demographic and physical
raw materials used to construct the first cities and states, and
increasing congestion provided much of the motivation for creating
states."
Fundamental purpose
According to supporters of government, the fundamental purpose of
government is the maintenance of basic security and
public order. The philosopher
Thomas Hobbes figured that people were
rational animals and thus saw submission to a government dominated
by a sovereign as preferable to
anarchy.
According to Hobbes, people in a community
create and
submit to government for the purpose of establishing for
themselves, safety and public order.
Early examples
These are examples of some of the earliest known governments:
Expanded roles
Military defense
The fundamental purpose of government is to maintain
social order and protect property.
Militaries are created to deal with the highly complex task of
confronting large numbers of enemies.
Once governments came onto the scene, they began to form and use
armies for conflicts with neighboring states, and for conquest of
new lands. Governments seek to maintain monopolies on the use of
force, and to that end, they usually suppress the development of
private armies within their borders.
Social security
Social security is related to economic security. Throughout most of
human history, parents prepared for their old age by producing
enough children to ensure that some of them would survive long
enough to take care of the parents in their old age. In modern,
relatively high-income societies, a mixed approach is taken where
the government shares a substantial responsibility of taking care
of the elderly.
This is not the case everywhere since there are still many
countries where social security through having many children is the
norm. Although social security is a relatively recent phenomenon,
prevalent mostly in developed countries, it deserves mention
because the existence of social security substantially changes
reproductive behavior in a society, and it has an impact on
reducing the
cycle of poverty. By reducing the cycle of
poverty, government creates a self-reinforcing cycle where people
see the government as friend both because of the financial support
they receive late in their lives, but also because of the overall
reduction in national poverty due to the government's social
security policies—which then adds to public support for social
security.Bruce Bartlett.
Social Security Then and Now.
COMMENTARY. March 2005, Vol. 119, No. 3, pp. 52-56. In the
online version on paragraph 13 it suggests that, During the
Great Depression, Roosevelt wanted
to suppress revolutionary tendencies by tying workers to the
state—hence a state-run social security system. Also read the
paragraphs above where it talks about populist demagogues and
socialist revolutions in other countries. Tying workers to the
state through social security was a politically strategic move
designed to preserve the United States of America and its
democracy.
Aspects of government
Governments vary greatly, as do the relationships of
citizens of a state to its government.
Abuse of power
The leaders of governments are human beings, and given human
nature, what constitutes good governance has been a subject written
about since the earliest books known. In the western tradition
Plato wrote extensively on the question, most
notably in
The Republic. He (in
the voice of
Socrates) asked if the purpose
of government was to help ones friends and hurt ones enemies, for
example.
Aristotle, Plato's student picked
up the subject in his treatise on
Politics. Many centuries later,
John Locke addressed the question of
abuse of power by writing on the importance of checks and balances
to prevent or at least constrain abuse. Many scholars believe that
Thomas Jefferson was influenced by
John Locke.
Legitimacy
The concept of
legitimacy is
central to the study of governments.
Statists have attempted to formalize ways to
legitimize government or
state
authority.
Social contract theorists, such as
Thomas Hobbes and
Jean-Jacques Rosseau, believe that
governments reduce people's freedom/rights in exchange for
protecting them, and maintaining order. Many people question
however, whether this is an actual exchange (where people
voluntarily give up their freedoms), or whether they are taken by
threat of force by the ruling party.
Other statist theorists, like
David Hume,
reject social contract theory on the grounds that, in reality,
consent is not involved in state-individual relationships and
instead offer different definitions of legitimacy based on
practicality and usefulness.
Anarchists, on the other hand, claim that
legitimacy for an authority must be consensual and reject the
concept of states altogether; For them, authority must be earned
not self-legitimated. For example, a police officer does not earn
his authority as a doctor does since the authority is voluntarily
transferred to the doctor while the police officer just takes
it.
Criticised aspects
War
In the most basic sense, people of one nation will see the
government of another nation as the enemy when the two nations are
at war.
For example, the people of Carthage
saw the
Roman
government as the enemy during the Punic wars.
Enslavement
In early
human history, the outcome of
war for the defeated was often enslavement. The enslaved people
would not find it easy to see the conquering government as a
friend.
Religious opposition
People with religious views opposed to the official state religion
will have a greater tendency to view that government as their
enemy. A good example would be the condition of
Roman Catholicism in England
before the
Catholic
Emancipation.
Protestants—who were politically dominant in
England
—used political, economic and social means to reduce
the size and strength of Catholicism in England over the 16th to
18th centuries, and as a result, Catholics in England felt that
their religion was being oppressed.
Class oppression
Whereas capitalists in a capitalist country may tend to see that
nation's government positively, a class-conscious group of
industrial workers—a
proletariat—may see
things very differently. If the proletariat wishes to take control
of the nation's
productive
resources, and they are blocked in their endeavors by
continuing adjustments in the law made by capitalists in the
government, then the proletariat will come to see the government as
their enemy—especially if the conflicts become violent.
The same situation can occur among peasants. The peasants in a
country, e.g. Russia during the reign of
Catherine the Great, may revolt against
their landlords, only to find that their revolution is put down by
government.
Critical views and alternatives
The relative merits of various forms of government have long been
debated by philosophers, politicians and others. However, in recent
times, the traditional conceptions of government and the role of
government have also attracted increasing criticism from a range of
sources. Some argue that the traditional conception of government,
which is heavily influenced by the zero-sum perceptions of state
actors and focuses on obtaining security and prosperity at a
national level through primarily unilateral action, is no longer
appropriate or effective in a modern world that is increasingly
connected and interdependent.
Human security
One such school of thought is
human
security, which advocates for a more people-based (as opposed
to state-based) conception of security, focusing on protection and
empowerment of individuals. Human security calls upon governments
to recognise that insecurity and instability in one region affects
all and to look beyond national borders in defining their interests
and formulating policies for security and development. Human
security also demands that governments engage in a far greater
level of cooperation and coordination with not only domestic
organisations, but also a range of international actors such as
foreign governments, intergovernmental organisations and
non-government organisations.
Whilst human security attempts to provide a more holistic and
comprehensive approach to world problems, its implementation still
relies to a large extent on the will and ability of governments to
adopt the agenda and appropriate policies. In this sense, human
security provides a critique of traditional conceptions of the role
of government, but also attempts to work within the current system
of state-based international relations. Of course, the unique
characteristics of different countries and resources available are
some constraints for governments in utilising a human security
framework.
Anarchism
Anarchists are those who disagree with
using government violence as a means to solve complex social issues
- or, in other words, they say that no entity can be
self-legitimated to use force and explicit
consent is necessary for legitimacy within a
collective group or government. There are many forms of anarchist
theories but under anarchy, these many different groups and
individuals would seemingly need to deal with each other in the
same way that people deal with their neighbors in the real world.
Some anarchists, such as
anarcho-syndicalists or
anarcho-primitivists, advocate
egalitarianism and
non-hierarchical societies while others, such as
anarcho-capitalists, advocate
free markets,
individual sovereignty and
freedom.
Related pages
Notes
- Fotopoulos, Takis, The Multidimensional
Crisis and Inclusive Democracy. (Athens:
Gordios, 2005).( English translation of the book with the same
title published in Greek).
- American 503
- American 1134
- American 1225
- American 1793
- American 65
- Christian 245
- Christian 253
- Most of this sentence is in the present tense because the
process is still ongoing.
- Christian 271
- The concept of the city itself became a self-reinforcing cycle.
"The creation of such large and dense communities required
new forms of power", and since cities concentrate power, the new
(sovereign) rulers had incentives to build and expand cities to
further increase their power.(Christian 271,321)
- Christian 248
- Schulze 81
- Dietz 68
- Social Contract Theory
- Dietz 65-66
- Hobbes idea of the necessity of the formation of government is
known as the social contract theory.
- The field of study and thought about the necessity of
governments and governments' relationships with people is known as
political philosophy.
- Christian 294
- Higham, "Indus Valley Civilization"
- Adler 80-81
- Nebel 165-166
-
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/john-locke-natural-rights-to-life-liberty-and-property/
- http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/influence.html
- Christian 358
References
- *Kenoyer, J. M. Ancient Cities of the Indus
Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998
- *Possehl, Gregory L.
Harappan Civilization: A Recent Perspective. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1993
- *Indus Age: The Writing System. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996
- *“Revolution in the Urban Revolution: The Emergence of Indus
Urbanisation,” Annual Review of Anthropology 19 (1990):
261–282.
External links
)—2000 BC
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