Justification for the state
Encyclopedia
The justification of the state is a term that refers to the source of legitimate authority for the state
or government
. Typically, a justification of the state explains why the state should exist, and what a legitimate state should or should not be able to do.
There is no single, universally accepted justification of the state. In fact, anarchists
believe that there is no justification for the state at all, and that human societies would be better off without it. However, most political ideologies
have their own justifications, and thus their own vision of what constitutes a legitimate state. Indeed, a person's opinions regarding the role of government often determine the rest of their political ideology. Thus, discrepancy of opinion in a wide array of political matters is often directly traceable back to a discrepancy of opinion in the justification for the state.
The constitution
s of various countries codify views as to the purposes, powers, and forms of their governments, but they tend to do so in rather vague terms, which particular laws, courts, and actions of politicians subsequently flesh out. In general, various countries have translated vague talk about the purposes of their governments into particular state laws, bureaucracies, enforcement actions, etc.
The following are just a few examples.
, the most widespread justification of the state was the divine right of kings
, which stated that monarchs draw their power from God
, and the state should only be an apparatus that puts the monarch's will into practice. The legitimacy of the states' lands was derived from the lands being the personal possession of the monarch. The divine right theory, combined with primogeniture
, became a theory of hereditary monarchy
in the nation states of the early modern period. The Holy Roman Empire
was not a state in that sense.
The political ideas current in China
at that time involved the idea of the mandate of heaven
. It was similar to the divine right in that it placed the ruler in a divine position, as the link between Heaven and Earth, but it differed from the divine right of kings in that it did not assume that the connection between a dynasty
and the state was permanent. Inherent in the concept was that a ruler held the mandate of heaven only as long as he provided good government. If he did not, heaven would withdraw its mandate restored order would hold the new mandate.
In a theocracy
, the divine will's primate over human laws is even more stringent as it makes political authority subservient to the religious leadership.
.
Thus modern political theorists typically legitimize the state with two major ideas: redistribution and the provision of public goods. In The Limits of Government, David Schmidtz (an economist) takes on the second of these ideas.
While a market system may allow self-interested to create and allocate many goods optimally, there exists a class of "collective" - or "public goods" that are not produced adequately in a market system. These collective goods are goods that all individuals want but for whose production it is often not individually rational for people voluntarily to do their part to secure a collectively rational outcome. The state can step in and force us all to contribute toward the production of these goods, and we can all thereby be made better off. There are actually many different opinions when it comes to this topic.
, socialism
, liberalism
, libertarianism
, fascism
, especially the latter, and other political ideologies. There are also two ideologies - anarchism
and communism
- which argue that the existence of the state is ultimately unjustified and harmful. For this reason, the kind of society they aim to establish would be stateless.
Anarchism claims that the community of those fighting to create a new society must themselves constitute a stateless community. Communism wishes to immediately or eventually replace the communities, unities and divisions that things such as work, money, exchange, borders, nations, governments, police, religion, and race create with the universal community possible when these things are replaced. http://prole.info/wcpw.html
State socialism
states that the degree to which a state is working class is the degree to which it fights government, class, work, and rule. The degree to which it wins such a fight is held to be the degree to which it is communist instead of capitalist, socialist, or the state. Stateless capitalism
argues that taxes are theft, that government and the business community complicit in governance is organized crime
and is equivalent to the criminal underworld, and that defense of life and property is just another industry, which must be privatized. Anarcho-communism and anarcho-collectivism says that taxes, being theft, are just property, which is also theft, and that the state is inherently capitalist and will never result in a transition to communism, and says that those fighting against capitalism and the state to produce a communist society must themselves already form such a community. However, the majority of viewpoints agree that the existence of some kind of government is morally justified. What they disagree about is the proper role and the proper form of that government.
There are several ways to conceive of the differences between these different political views. For example, one might ask in what areas should the government have jurisdiction, to what extent it may intervene in those areas, or even what constitutes intervention in the first place. A lot of institutions can be said to exist only because the government provides the framework for their existence; for instance, Marxists
argue that the institution of private property
only exists due to government.
State (polity)
A state is an organized political community, living under a government. States may be sovereign and may enjoy a monopoly on the legal initiation of force and are not dependent on, or subject to any other power or state. Many states are federated states which participate in a federal union...
or government
Government
Government refers to the legislators, administrators, and arbitrators in the administrative bureaucracy who control a state at a given time, and to the system of government by which they are organized...
. Typically, a justification of the state explains why the state should exist, and what a legitimate state should or should not be able to do.
There is no single, universally accepted justification of the state. In fact, anarchists
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
believe that there is no justification for the state at all, and that human societies would be better off without it. However, most political ideologies
Ideology
An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...
have their own justifications, and thus their own vision of what constitutes a legitimate state. Indeed, a person's opinions regarding the role of government often determine the rest of their political ideology. Thus, discrepancy of opinion in a wide array of political matters is often directly traceable back to a discrepancy of opinion in the justification for the state.
The constitution
Constitution
A constitution is a set of fundamental principles or established precedents according to which a state or other organization is governed. These rules together make up, i.e. constitute, what the entity is...
s of various countries codify views as to the purposes, powers, and forms of their governments, but they tend to do so in rather vague terms, which particular laws, courts, and actions of politicians subsequently flesh out. In general, various countries have translated vague talk about the purposes of their governments into particular state laws, bureaucracies, enforcement actions, etc.
The following are just a few examples.
Transcendent sovereignty
In feudal EuropeEurope
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
, the most widespread justification of the state was the divine right of kings
Divine Right of Kings
The divine right of kings or divine-right theory of kingship is a political and religious doctrine of royal and political legitimacy. It asserts that a monarch is subject to no earthly authority, deriving his right to rule directly from the will of God...
, which stated that monarchs draw their power from God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
, and the state should only be an apparatus that puts the monarch's will into practice. The legitimacy of the states' lands was derived from the lands being the personal possession of the monarch. The divine right theory, combined with primogeniture
Primogeniture
Primogeniture is the right, by law or custom, of the firstborn to inherit the entire estate, to the exclusion of younger siblings . Historically, the term implied male primogeniture, to the exclusion of females...
, became a theory of hereditary monarchy
Hereditary monarchy
A hereditary monarchy is the most common type of monarchy and is the form that is used by almost all of the world's existing monarchies.Under a hereditary monarchy, all the monarchs come from the same family, and the crown is passed down from one member to another member of the family...
in the nation states of the early modern period. The Holy Roman Empire
Holy Roman Empire
The Holy Roman Empire was a realm that existed from 962 to 1806 in Central Europe.It was ruled by the Holy Roman Emperor. Its character changed during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, when the power of the emperor gradually weakened in favour of the princes...
was not a state in that sense.
The political ideas current in China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
at that time involved the idea of the mandate of heaven
Mandate of Heaven
The Mandate of Heaven is a traditional Chinese philosophical concept concerning the legitimacy of rulers. It is similar to the European concept of the divine right of kings, in that both sought to legitimaze rule from divine approval; however, unlike the divine right of kings, the Mandate of...
. It was similar to the divine right in that it placed the ruler in a divine position, as the link between Heaven and Earth, but it differed from the divine right of kings in that it did not assume that the connection between a dynasty
Dynasty
A dynasty is a sequence of rulers considered members of the same family. Historians traditionally consider many sovereign states' history within a framework of successive dynasties, e.g., China, Ancient Egypt and the Persian Empire...
and the state was permanent. Inherent in the concept was that a ruler held the mandate of heaven only as long as he provided good government. If he did not, heaven would withdraw its mandate restored order would hold the new mandate.
In a theocracy
Theocracy
Theocracy is a form of organization in which the official policy is to be governed by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided, or simply pursuant to the doctrine of a particular religious sect or religion....
, the divine will's primate over human laws is even more stringent as it makes political authority subservient to the religious leadership.
The social contract
In the period of the eighteenth century, usually called the Enlightenment, a new justification of the European state developed. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's social contract theory states that governments draw their power from the governed, its 'sovereign' people (usually a certain ethnic group, and the state's limits are legitimated theoretically as that people's lands, although that is often not, rarely exactly, the case), that no person should have absolute power, and that a legitimate state is one which meets the needs and wishes of its citizens. These include security, peace, economic development and the resolution of conflict. Also, the social contract requires that an individual gives up some of his natural rights in order to maintain social order via the rule of law. Eventually, the divine right of kings fell out of favor and this idea ascended; it formed the basis for modern democracyDemocracy
Democracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...
.
Public goods
This is an example of the theoretical thinking shifting the emphasis from faith and theoretical principles such as sovereignty to the socio-economic logic, as Karl Marx did.Thus modern political theorists typically legitimize the state with two major ideas: redistribution and the provision of public goods. In The Limits of Government, David Schmidtz (an economist) takes on the second of these ideas.
While a market system may allow self-interested to create and allocate many goods optimally, there exists a class of "collective" - or "public goods" that are not produced adequately in a market system. These collective goods are goods that all individuals want but for whose production it is often not individually rational for people voluntarily to do their part to secure a collectively rational outcome. The state can step in and force us all to contribute toward the production of these goods, and we can all thereby be made better off. There are actually many different opinions when it comes to this topic.
Political ideologies
It is on those questions that one can find the differences between conservatismConservatism
Conservatism is a political and social philosophy that promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports, at the most, minimal and gradual change in society. Some conservatives seek to preserve things as they are, emphasizing stability and continuity, while others oppose modernism...
, socialism
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
, liberalism
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
, libertarianism
Libertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
, fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
, especially the latter, and other political ideologies. There are also two ideologies - anarchism
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
and communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
- which argue that the existence of the state is ultimately unjustified and harmful. For this reason, the kind of society they aim to establish would be stateless.
Anarchism claims that the community of those fighting to create a new society must themselves constitute a stateless community. Communism wishes to immediately or eventually replace the communities, unities and divisions that things such as work, money, exchange, borders, nations, governments, police, religion, and race create with the universal community possible when these things are replaced. http://prole.info/wcpw.html
State socialism
State socialism
State socialism is an economic system with limited socialist characteristics, such as public ownership of major industries, remedial measures to benefit the working class, and a gradual process of developing socialism through government policy...
states that the degree to which a state is working class is the degree to which it fights government, class, work, and rule. The degree to which it wins such a fight is held to be the degree to which it is communist instead of capitalist, socialist, or the state. Stateless capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-capitalism is a libertarian and individualist anarchist political philosophy that advocates the elimination of the state in favour of individual sovereignty in a free market...
argues that taxes are theft, that government and the business community complicit in governance is organized crime
Organized crime
Organized crime or criminal organizations are transnational, national, or local groupings of highly centralized enterprises run by criminals for the purpose of engaging in illegal activity, most commonly for monetary profit. Some criminal organizations, such as terrorist organizations, are...
and is equivalent to the criminal underworld, and that defense of life and property is just another industry, which must be privatized. Anarcho-communism and anarcho-collectivism says that taxes, being theft, are just property, which is also theft, and that the state is inherently capitalist and will never result in a transition to communism, and says that those fighting against capitalism and the state to produce a communist society must themselves already form such a community. However, the majority of viewpoints agree that the existence of some kind of government is morally justified. What they disagree about is the proper role and the proper form of that government.
There are several ways to conceive of the differences between these different political views. For example, one might ask in what areas should the government have jurisdiction, to what extent it may intervene in those areas, or even what constitutes intervention in the first place. A lot of institutions can be said to exist only because the government provides the framework for their existence; for instance, Marxists
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
argue that the institution of private property
Property
Property is any physical or intangible entity that is owned by a person or jointly by a group of people or a legal entity like a corporation...
only exists due to government.
See also
- AnarchismAnarchismAnarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
- Consequentialist justifications of the stateConsequentialist justifications of the stateConsequentialist justifications of the state are philosophical arguments which contend that the state is justified by the good results it produces....
- Monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force
- Political philosophyPolitical philosophyPolitical philosophy is the study of such topics as liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what, if anything, makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it...
- Constitutional economicsConstitutional economicsConstitutional economics is a research program in economics and constitutionalism that has been described as extending beyond the definition of 'the economic analysis of constitutional law' in explaining the choice "of alternative sets of legal-institutional-constitutional rules that constrain the...
- Rule of lawRule of lawThe rule of law, sometimes called supremacy of law, is a legal maxim that says that governmental decisions should be made by applying known principles or laws with minimal discretion in their application...
- Rule According to Higher LawRule according to higher lawThe rule according to a higher law means that no written law may be enforced by the government unless it conforms with certain unwritten, universal principles of fairness, morality, and justice...
- RechtsstaatRechtsstaatRechtsstaat is a concept in continental European legal thinking, originally borrowed from German jurisprudence, which can be translated as "legal state", "state of law", "state of justice", or "state of rights"...
- Political philosophy of Immanuel KantPolitical philosophy of Immanuel KantImmanuel Kant favoured a classical republican approach to political philosophy. In Kant listed several conditions that he thought necessary for ending wars and creating a lasting peace. They included a world of constitutional republics by establishment of political community...