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.
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.
[Christian 245] David Christian explains how this resulted 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."
[Christian 248]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.
[Dietz 68] According to Hobbes, people in a community
create and
submit to government for the purpose of establishing for themselves, safety and public order.
[Dietz 65-66]Early examples
These are examples of some of the earliest known governments:
- Yellow River Civilization (China)—2000 BC
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,
[Adler 80-81] 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.
[Nebel 165-166] 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.
Aspects of government
thumb|right|The Parliament of the United Kingdom, the 'Mother of all Parliaments'
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 transfered 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.
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