Government

Aristotle provides what remains the foundational taxonomy of political forms. He distinguishes three legitimate constitutions, monarchy, aristocracy, and polity, from their three corrupted counterparts, tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy, by a single criterion: whether the government is directed to the common good of the whole community or to the private interest of the rulers. By this measure, a king who governs well and a popular assembly that governs well are alike legitimate; a single despot and a factious many are alike defective.

The criterion is, on its face, simple, but its application requires judgment. Aristotle is not disposed to argue that any one form is absolutely best regardless of circumstances; the polity, a mixed constitution that blends popular participation with the stability and quality provided by well-ordered institutions, is in most actual conditions the most durable arrangement. What matters in each case is not the number of those who rule but the end they serve. The distinction between legitimate and perverted forms of government is discussed in connection with the classification of constitutions in the chapter on CONSTITUTION.

Aristotle also insists that political community is natural to human beings, not an artificial remedy or a mere convenience. Man is by nature a political animal, and the person who lives outside a city is either a beast or a god. Government is not a necessary evil, as later contract theorists will argue, but the condition within which the fuller development of human nature becomes possible. The bearing of this claim on the question of human freedom and self-governance is considered in the chapter on LIBERTY.

Aristotle's taxonomy and his criterion of the common good shape every major discussion of government before and through Machiavelli. It is only when Machiavelli sets aside the question of whether rule serves the common good and asks instead whether it endures that the classical tradition is interrupted and a new kind of political analysis begins.

Augustine's account of government is shaped throughout by his doctrine of the Fall. Before sin, in his view, there would have been no need for coercive authority; human beings would have lived in natural harmony under the guidance of reason. After sin, political authority became necessary as a restraint on wickedness, a providential accommodation to the disorder that original sin introduced into human nature. Government is thus, for Augustine, a remedy rather than a natural perfection of human sociality in the way Aristotle had maintained.

The consequence is a significantly different evaluation of earthly kingdoms. Even Rome at the height of its power was driven, Augustine argues, more by the libido dominandi, the lust for domination, than by genuine justice. No earthly polity can achieve more than an imperfect, partial justice and a fragile, provisional peace. Yet Augustine does not counsel withdrawal from political life. Earthly peace, though far below the peace of the City of God, is a genuine good, and the Christian may serve as magistrate, soldier, or ruler precisely because such service supports that limited but real good.

The two cities that Augustine distinguishes run through all of history, defined not by their visible membership but by what they love. The earthly city loves itself to the contempt of God; the heavenly city loves God to the contempt of self. No earthly government is simply identical with either city; every political community contains persons belonging to both. The relation of Augustine's two cities to the question of justice in political life is considered in the chapter on JUSTICE.

Augustine establishes the framework within which medieval political thought operates: political authority is real and divinely permitted, but it is provisional, instrumental, and ordered to ends that transcend any particular state. Aquinas will inherit this framework while pressing it in a more Aristotelian direction, arguing that political community is natural as well as remedial and that the ruler's authority is genuinely conditional on his fidelity to the common good.

Aquinas recovers Aristotle's view that political community is natural to human beings within a framework that also preserves Augustine's insistence on the limits of earthly authority. Human beings are by nature social and political creatures, designed for life in community; government is not merely a remedy for sin but a requirement of human nature itself. This Aristotelian naturalism Aquinas embeds in a hierarchy of laws: eternal law, which is God's rational governance of all things; natural law, which is reason's participation in that governance; divine law, given in revelation; and human positive law, which derives its authority from the natural law it enacts.

Legitimate government is authority exercised in conformity with natural law and directed to the common good. Among the possible forms, Aquinas inclines in principle toward kingship as the form that best images the unity of divine governance, but he recognizes its vulnerability to corruption and recommends in practice a mixed constitution combining elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and popular participation, so that each element may check the others. When a ruler departs from the common good and governs instead for his own advantage, he becomes a tyrant, and his commands lose their claim on the obedience of conscience. The connection between Aquinas's theory of law and his account of political authority is treated more fully in the chapter on LAW.

The implication that a ruler's commands may cease to bind is significant for the subsequent tradition. Aquinas is cautious about the permissibility of active resistance, distinguishing it from cases where unjust commands simply need not be obeyed; but the conceptual resources he provides, the conditionality of authority on the common good, the distinction between legitimate and merely coercive power, are precisely those that later thinkers, Locke among them, will deploy in justifying more active forms of political resistance.

Aquinas synthesizes Aristotelian naturalism with Augustinian providentialism into the most comprehensive medieval account of legitimate authority. The conditional character of political power that his analysis entails is the opening through which Locke will later drive the argument for a people's right to dissolve a government that has violated its trust.

Machiavelli separates the analysis of government from the moral framework within which the entire prior tradition had conducted it. Where Aristotle and Aquinas judged constitutions by whether they served the common good, Machiavelli judges rulers by whether they maintain their state and, through it, the security and greatness of their city. The criterion shifts from the end that government serves to the effectiveness with which it sustains itself. A prince "who wishes to maintain himself must learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge or not use it according to necessity."

This is not a simple commendation of cruelty. Machiavelli distinguishes between cruelty well used and cruelty poorly used, and he praises the Roman Republic at length in the Discourses for the mixed constitution and the popular participation that made it enduring. What he removes from political analysis is any appeal to divine law, natural order, or the metaphysical status of the common good as a standard by which rulers may be measured. Politics, on his account, is the domain of human action under conditions of fortune: chance, necessity, and the distribution of power among actual men. The prince who ignores these conditions in favor of an "imaginary republic" will be destroyed; the prince who faces them with courage and judgment may prevail.

The implications for the theory of legitimacy are far-reaching. If a ruler who fails, however virtuous his intentions, loses his claim to govern, and if a ruler who succeeds, however dirty the means employed, is confirmed in his power, then legitimacy is in large measure a function of effectiveness. The question of whether this conclusion is correct, or whether moral categories retain their independent authority over political action, is one that every subsequent thinker in the tradition must address. The relation between Machiavelli's realism and the classical tradition of political virtue is considered in the chapter on PRUDENCE.

Machiavelli inaugurates the tradition of political realism that runs through Hobbes and beyond. Every subsequent theorist must reckon with the challenge he poses: that effective rule may require what traditional morality forbids, and that political analysis conducted entirely within moral categories may fail to illuminate the conditions of actual governance.

Hobbes gives the social contract its first rigorous formulation. Without government, human life is, in the state of nature, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," because each person, equal to every other in capacity and driven by the same competitive desires, has a right to everything and therefore secure possession of nothing. Rational persons, perceiving this condition, find sufficient reason to surrender their individual right of self-defense to a common authority capable of enforcing peace. The Leviathan is the artificial person created by this authorization.

The contract, as Hobbes constructs it, is made among the subjects themselves rather than between ruler and ruled. Each agrees with all the others to authorize the sovereign's acts as their own. The sovereign, standing outside the contract, cannot violate it; his authority is undivided and unconditional, because any limitation on sovereign power would reintroduce precisely the disputes that the contract was designed to settle. Whether sovereignty is held by one man or by an assembly makes no difference to its character: in either case it is absolute, in the sense that no positive law can bind the sovereign, who has the power to make and repeal laws as he pleases. The question of absolute versus limited sovereignty is discussed more fully in the chapter on CONSTITUTION.

It would be a misreading, however, to regard Hobbes's argument as a defense of arbitrary rule in the traditional sense. The authority of the sovereign rests entirely on the authorization given by the subjects, not on divine right or natural hierarchy. Government is legitimate because and insofar as it is consented to. If the sovereign fails utterly to provide the protection for which the subjects surrendered their natural liberty, the contract is void and subjects recover the rights they had in the state of nature.

Hobbes establishes consent as the basis of legitimate government, but the authorization he describes, once given, is irrevocable except in the event of the sovereign's total failure. Locke will transform this structure by making the authorization conditional and continuously subject to revision, and by specifying the conditions under which the people may dissolve a government that has violated its trust.

Locke accepts the contractual origin of political authority but rejects the necessity of absolute sovereignty that Hobbes had derived from it. In Locke's account of the state of nature, persons already possess natural rights to life, liberty, and property, rights that exist prior to any political arrangement and that no government may legitimately abrogate. The purpose of entering civil society is not to escape a condition of universal war, as it is for Hobbes, but to enjoy one's rights more securely and impartially than individuals can secure them for themselves.

The structure of political authority in Locke follows from this purpose. There are, in effect, two stages of consent: first, individuals agree to form a political community; second, the community by majority decision institutes a government as its trustee. The government holds its power on trust, bound to govern by settled and promulgated laws, to act only for the public good, and to preserve the property, in Locke's broad sense, of its members. The legislative power is supreme among the branches but not absolute: it may not take from persons what is theirs without their consent, and it may not delegate its authority to others. The separation of legislative from executive power, and the conditions of legitimate taxation and law, are treated more fully in the chapter on CONSTITUTION.

When a government systematically violates the trust, acting as if at war with the people it was constituted to protect, the people recover the authority they had originally committed to it and may dissolve the government and institute another. This right of revolution, as it has been called, supplied the philosophical foundation drawn upon in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution of 1776. The bearing of Locke's argument on the question of political obligation and civil disobedience is considered in the chapter on CITIZEN.

Locke's account of government as a fiduciary power, conditional on its fidelity to the rights it was instituted to protect, inaugurates the tradition of liberal constitutionalism. A question his account does not fully resolve is whether majority decision, which dissolves a government that violates natural rights, is itself capable of becoming the oppressor of minorities within the community. Rousseau will press this difficulty, insisting that legitimate authority requires not merely the will of the majority but the general will, and that these are by no means the same.

Montesquieu's principal contribution to the theory of government is institutional. He takes the insight, present in Locke and anticipated in the ancient discussion of mixed constitutions, that political authority must be limited, and translates it into a structural principle: the legislative, executive, and judicial powers of government must be lodged in distinct bodies, each capable of checking the others, so that, in his phrase, power may arrest power. Where Locke had separated the legislative from the executive, Montesquieu gives the judiciary its own independent status and draws from English constitutional practice a general theory of how this arrangement secures liberty.

His prior analysis classifies governments by their nature and their animating principle. Republics, whether aristocratic or democratic, have virtue as their principle; monarchies have honor; despotisms have fear. When the animating principle is corrupted, the constitution deteriorates toward its defective counterpart. The distinctive contribution of Montesquieu's analysis of the English constitution is to show that liberty does not depend on the virtue of any particular ruler or on the moral character of the people, but on institutions so arranged that no single branch is capable of exercising all the powers of government. This is what makes it, in his terms, a "moderate government."

"Constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it." If this is so, the solution is not to seek better men but to design institutions such that the ambition of each branch restrains the ambition of the others. The result is a conception of political liberty as an architectural achievement, secured by the design of government rather than by the virtue of those who govern. The question left open is whether institutions without civic virtue can sustain themselves, a problem that Rousseau will take up by insisting on the indispensable role of the citizen's moral participation in political life.

Montesquieu supplies the design principles that modern constitutional government has largely adopted. His analysis of the separation of powers, taken up and modified by the authors of the American Federalist, becomes the practical standard against which subsequent proposals for the organization of government are measured.

Rousseau locates sovereignty definitively in the people themselves, distinguishing the sovereign from the government more sharply than any prior thinker in the contract tradition had done. For Hobbes, the contract created an absolute sovereign standing above the people; for Locke, a trustee accountable to the people but acting in their stead. For Rousseau, legitimate authority is nothing other than the people's own self-governance expressed through the general will: the rational will of the community considered as a moral body willing its own common good.

The general will requires careful distinction from the will of all, which is merely the aggregate of particular preferences, and from the majority vote, which may reflect particular interests rather than the common good. The general will is what the people would will if they deliberated as citizens, setting aside private advantage and asking what is best for the community as a whole. Laws are legitimate only when they express this general will, and each citizen, in obeying such a law, obeys the rational will that he himself has as a member of the community. This is the sense in which Rousseau's claim that a person "forced to be free" can be understood: to be compelled to comply with a law one has authorized as a member of the sovereign is not servitude but the condition of genuine political freedom. The relation between this argument and the question of political liberty is examined in the chapter on LIBERTY.

Government in the strict sense, for Rousseau, is only the executive body charged with administering the laws that the sovereign people enact. Governments may be administered democratically, aristocratically, or monarchically without this affecting the location of sovereignty, which always remains with the people. When a government usurps the legislative authority of the sovereign, the social compact is broken and the people recover their natural liberty. Popular sovereignty is thus inalienable and cannot be represented.

Rousseau provides the philosophical foundation for the doctrine of popular sovereignty that modern democratic theory presupposes. Kant will reformulate the general will as a rational test rather than an empirical political reality, abstracting from the conditions of any particular community. Hegel will argue that the very notion of the people as a self-governing sovereign is incoherent without the institutional articulation that makes popular will more than a formless aggregate.

Kant draws on the main currents of the liberal tradition, from Locke's insistence on natural rights and limited government, to Montesquieu's separation of powers, to Rousseau's principle that legitimate law expresses the united will of the people, and attempts to ground them all in pure practical reason. The "civil condition" is not for Kant a merely advantageous arrangement; it is a moral requirement. Rational beings are obligated to leave the state of nature and enter into a condition of public right, because only under law can freedom, equality, and independence be reconciled and secured for all.

The legitimate state is republican, though not in the narrow sense of excluding monarchy. Republicanism, for Kant, is defined by three features: the freedom of each member of society as a human being, the equality of each with every other as a subject, and the dependence of each as a citizen on the legislation to which all have given, or could give, their rational consent. The executive and legislative powers must be separated, so that those who enact the law are not those who administer it. Kant distinguishes sharply between republicanism so understood and democracy in the sense of direct popular rule without separated powers; the latter is, in his view, necessarily despotic, because it places the making and the executing of law in the same hands.

Kant also extends the principle of republican government to the relations among states. Just as individuals have a duty to leave the state of nature for a civil condition, so states have a duty to enter into a federation of free states that would adjudicate their disputes by law rather than by force. The connection between Kant's internal and external arguments for republican government is treated in the chapter on WAR AND PEACE.

Kant provides the liberal constitutional tradition with its most rigorous philosophical derivation. Hegel will object that a state constructed from abstract rational principles, without attention to the concrete ethical communities of family, civil society, and national tradition, mistakes a set of formal conditions for the full reality of political life, and that the actual freedom of citizens requires not only rights but the institutions through which rational will becomes culturally embodied.

Hegel rejects the contractarian tradition root and branch. The state, on his account, is not an aggregate of pre-political individuals who agree to cooperate for mutual benefit; it is an ethical substance, a concrete form of rational life, that makes individuality possible in the first place. Abstract individuals, considered apart from the social and historical institutions in which they are formed, are not the foundation of political life but an abstraction from it. "The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea": the concrete realization of reason in the institutions of political community.

Hegel distinguishes three moments in what he calls ethical life. The family is the immediate unity of persons through love. Civil society is the system of individual needs, market relations, and particular interests in which persons pursue their private ends and are mediated by one another through the mechanism of the market and the administration of justice. The state proper takes up and reconciles these two moments: it preserves the differentiation of civil society while overcoming its atomism in a rational unity that is genuinely universal. The state is not opposed to individual freedom but is the condition under which freedom attains its concrete, objective form. The relation between civil society and the state, and the implications for Hegel's account of property and poverty, is treated in the chapter on WEALTH.

Popular sovereignty, as Rousseau understood it, is for Hegel a confused notion. The people as an unformed mass cannot govern; they can exercise political will only as organized in the institutions of the rational state. Hegel defends a constitutional monarchy, in which the monarch embodies the unity of the state without exercising arbitrary power, the estates represent the differentiated interests of civil society, and a professional bureaucracy administers the universal interest. Legitimacy comes from the rational articulation of these institutions, not from the ability to aggregate individual preferences.

Hegel's account is the most powerful nineteenth-century critique of contract theory from within the tradition of political philosophy. The claim that the state is constitutive of freedom, rather than merely its protector, challenges every account that begins with pre-political individuals and their natural rights. Marx will take this critique further by arguing that the Hegelian state, far from being the actualization of rational freedom, is itself an expression of the economic relations of civil society and the interests of those who dominate them.

Mill defends representative democracy as the ideally best form of government, but his defense is thoroughly qualified, and the qualifications are as important as the principle. A government is to be judged, he argues, by two criteria: its action on things, meaning how well it achieves practical results; and its action on men, meaning how well it develops the character, intelligence, and moral qualities of those who live under it. By both criteria, representative government, in which sovereignty is vested in the entire community but exercised through elected representatives, excels all alternatives when the conditions for it are satisfied.

Those conditions are not always present. A people must be willing to accept a form of government, capable of performing what it requires, and willing to do what is necessary to keep it in being. Peoples lacking these conditions will be harmed rather than benefited by institutions of self-government. Mill's position thus permits the qualified endorsement of what he calls government of the preparatory kind, paternal or otherwise, for peoples not yet ready for representative institutions. The bearing of this argument on the question of political education and colonial administration is considered in the chapter on LIBERTY.

Even where the conditions are met, Mill worries about the distinctive dangers of democratic government: the tendency of majorities to oppress minorities, the threat of intellectual conformity, and the risk that the mass of mediocre opinion will overwhelm the superior wisdom that good legislation requires. Representative institutions must therefore be designed to give weight to educated and informed opinion, to protect minority representation through proportional voting, and to ensure that those who execute the law are qualified to do so. Mill's proposals for plural voting and for an expert executive body insulated from direct electoral pressure reflect these concerns.

Mill provides the most fully articulated nineteenth-century defense of liberal representative democracy, attending carefully to the conditions under which it succeeds and those under which it fails. His anxieties about majority tyranny and the quality of democratic deliberation anticipate difficulties that twentieth-century political theorists have continued to find unresolved.

Marx argues that the question of what makes government legitimate, which has occupied the political tradition from Aristotle through Mill, rests on an assumption that requires examination before the question can be answered. The state is not, as the tradition has generally supposed, an independent institution with its own moral standing, standing above particular interests in the name of the common good. It is, on Marx's analysis, an organ through which the dominant economic class maintains and exercises its power over all other classes. "The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."

This does not entail that all political forms are equally indifferent to the working class. Marx acknowledges that bourgeois democracy, with its formal political equality, its rights of association, and its sphere of parliamentary contestation, represents a real advance over feudal and absolutist regimes, and he regards the extension of the franchise and the organization of labor within existing political institutions as instruments of working-class development. But formal political equality coexists with, and in his view tends to obscure, the material inequality on which capitalist property relations rest. The vote is granted in part because its exercise, within the existing structure of economic power, cannot by itself alter that structure.

Marx's positive account of what is to replace the bourgeois state is, characteristically, brief and largely negative. The Paris Commune of 1871 offered a model: elected and recallable officials paid at workers' wages, the standing army replaced by the armed people, and the bureaucracy dissolved into the self-organization of associated producers. As the class antagonisms that make a coercive state necessary are progressively overcome, the state, understood as a power standing above and enforcing itself upon civil society, ceases to be needed and gradually ceases to exist. The relation between this argument and the question of political authority in socialist theory is considered in the chapter on REVOLUTION.

Marx reframes the entire discussion by insisting that political institutions cannot be assessed in abstraction from the economic relations they presuppose and reinforce. Whether this reframing dissolves the question of legitimate government or merely displaces it is a question that political theory after Marx has not settled.