GOVERNMENT

the political system by which a nation or community is administered and regulated. The subject of government is treated in a number of articles. For a survey of governmental systems, see government. For a treatment of the legal structures of governments, see civil law; common law; constitution; constitutional law; court; crime and punishment; Germanic law; police; Roman law; Roman-Dutch law; Scandinavian law; Scottish law; socialist law. For a treatment of fiscal and administrative operations, see government budget; public administration; social service; taxation. For political aspects, see political party; political system; public opinion. For a treatment of ethical and philosophical issues in the theory of government, see censorship; human rights; ideology; propaganda; anarchism; communism; conservatism; fascism; liberalism; nationalism; socialism. For a treatment of urban government in particular, see city. For information on specific governments, see Index under names of individual political units. Attempts have sometimes been made to classify governments as existing either for the public good or for the self-interest of the governors. In fact, governmental functioning always depends upon some combination of consent and constraint. Even primitive governments, in which religious and governmental functions were often unified in the person of a priest-king, allowed for some manifestation of the wills of the governed in decision making. What differentiates primitive from later governments is that the primitive one usually lacks writing, currency, or autonomous administrative institutions. Primitive government evolved most straightforwardly into Asian despotism, which persisted as the dominant form of government on that continent until the 20th century. Contrary to common belief, an Oriental despot did not generally exercise very tight control over his subjects; rather, under such a regime, a great diversity of governmental practices pertained in different parts of the territory, and a generally liberal attitude toward human creativity is attested by the great cultures that flourished under them. Oriental despotism lasted as long as the economies of Asia rested on manual labour and handicrafts; it became obsolete when the introduction of modern industry brought a need for more elaborate governmental organization. Plato and Aristotle, the earliest Western comprehensive theorists of government whose work has survived, divided governments into those in which power was held by individuals, by groups, and by all citizens. The evolution of governments in the ancient Greek city-states followed just such a numerical progression; beginning as monarchies under tribal kings, they became military aristocracies, then plutocracies which gradually extended citizenship to more and more classes. Conflicts arose among aristocratic, plutocratic, and democratic factions within cities; as the different city-states underwent transitions at different rates, Athens became the bastion of democratic and Sparta the bastion of aristocratic power. In the Republic, Plato argued that a society is best ruled by a single individual; in the Laws, he amended his theory to state that the authority of the individual ruler might beneficially be largely replaced by a set of laws and the ideal government would rely on a single executive for some decisions, a group for others, and all the citizenry for the rest. Such a division of power came to pass to a significant degree under the Roman Republic. There, the power of the two consuls was offset by that of the Senate, a legislative body representing first only the aristocratic classes but eventually all classes of citizens. Before the Roman Empire devolved into tyranny and collapsed, Roman law, beset with the problem of Christianity, had become the first in history to declare the principle of separation of church and state. Thus, in medieval and Renaissance Europe, national governments coexisted with religious governments to which their authorities were in many respects subordinate. Niccol Machiavelli, Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, and other theorists who wrote to support secular governmental authority against that of the church originated the concepts of nation and state (the philosophic and spiritual projection of the nation) as counterparts to the ecclesiastical concepts of the visible and invisible church. Since then, national government has come to have definitive centrality. As states have grown and human technologies developed, the functions of governments have grown increasingly more complex and extensive. Under the absolute monarchies, which were the dominant form of government in Europe from the 16th to the 18th century, the task of coordinating the administration of royal decrees was carried out by a growing class of bookkeepers, letter writers, and annalists. The evolution of this class produced the bureaucracy that is central to the orderly functioning of modern governments, be they constitutional or totalitarian. In constitutional systems, powers of legislation and enforcement are divided among executive, legislative, and judicial components, and the ability of any one person to continue to hold power is subject to periodic recourse to an electorate. Legislators are elected in each of the discrete districts which together make up the territory served by the government; the chief executive is chosen either in a direct election throughout the territory (as in the United States) or by the legislature (as in Great Britain). Totalitarian dictatorship is perhaps the most distinctively modern form of government. Generally, a dictatorship is established when an organized minority seizes power by force or fraud and rapidly assumes complete control over the government. A mass party grows out of this original group and looks to it for the reconstruction of society; it is the existence of this mass party that distinguishes these governments from historical tyrannies or absolutist states. Opposition to the dictator is stifled by the imposition of state control over all forms of expression, including science, religion, and the arts; the institution of secret police and spying networks; and the suppression or destruction of all opposing political parties. by James Mill The Supplement to the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Editions (1815-24) was the first Britannica publication to present signed articles, and the most prolific of the distinguished contributors recruited for the work was James Mill. Of the dozen articles he wrote for Editor Macvey Napier, the one that made the most lasting impression was "Government." In it Mill took the reader through a short course in what was known in that day as Philosophical Radicalism and arrived at the controversial conclusion that a representative democracy, based on wide (though not universal, or even universal male) suffrage, is a necessary element of good government. The article, and the public debate it engendered (carried on vigorously by, among others, Mills' son John Stuart Mill and Britannica-contributor-to-be Thomas Babington Macaulay) helped prepare the ground for the great Reform Bill of 1832. government the political system by which a nation or community is administered and regulated. Most of the key words commonly used to describe governments, words such as monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy, are of Greek or Roman origin. They have been current for more than 2,000 years and have not yet exhausted their usefulness. This suggests that mankind has not changed very much since they were coined; but such verbal and psychological uniformity must not be allowed to hide the enormous changes in society and politics that have occurred. The earliest analytical use of the term monarchy occurred in ancient Athens, chiefly in Plato's dialogues, but even in Plato's time the word was not self-explanatory. There was a king in Macedon and a king in Persia, but the two societies, and therefore their institutions, were radically different. To give real meaning to the word monarchy in these two instances, it would be necessary to investigate their actual political and historical contexts. Any general account of monarchy required then, and requires today, an inquiry as to what circumstances have predisposed societies to adopt monarchy, and what have led them to reject it. So it is with all political terms. Additional reading Classical texts on governmental forms are widely available in numerous editions. They include Plato, The Republic; Aristotle, Politics; Niccol Machiavelli, The Prince and The Discourses; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan; John Locke, Second Treatise of Government; Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract; Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence; Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist; Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France; Thomas Paine, Rights of Man; Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America; Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution; James Bryce, The American Commonwealth; Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State; and V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution.For a subject of this nature, a solid background in world history is absolutely necessary, and William H. McNeill, A World History, 3rd ed. (1979), is an excellent introduction. Gordon Childe, What Happened in History, rev. ed. (1954, reprinted 1982), is a classic survey of the contribution of archaeology to our understanding of prehistory and the ancient world. For the development of governmental forms in Greece, see The Cambridge Ancient History, 3rd ed. (1970- ); and N.G.L. Hammond, A History of Greece to 332 B.C., 2nd ed. (1967, reprinted 1981). A.H.M. Jones, Athenian Democracy (1957, reprinted 1975), is indispensable, particularly as a corrective to Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides. The most exciting work about the Romans written since Gibbon is Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (1939, reprinted 1974); those wanting more general accounts of the Romans may turn to J.P.V.D. Balsdon (ed.), The Romans (1966); and H.H. Scullard, From the Gracchi to Nero, 5th ed. (1982). A.H.M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 2 vol. (1964), is the most authoritative account of the fall of the empire.The best introduction to the medieval papacy is Walter Ullmann, A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages (1972). The same author's Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed. (1970), links ideas and institutions but makes few concessions to beginners. Marc Bloch, Feudal Society (1961, reissued 1974; originally published in French, 1939), is an indispensable study of its subject.The development of political thought from the Renaissance to the 19th century is well presented in John P. Plamenatz, Man and Society, 2 vol. (1963, reprinted 1972-74). An attempt to trace modern government back to its origins is demonstrated in Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966). See also Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974); and Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (1970; originally published in Italian, 1970).Works on governmental forms of a general, comparative nature include A. Goodwin (ed.), The European Nobility in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed. (1967); A. Lawrence Lowell, Governments and Parties in Continental Europe, 2 vol. (1896, reissued 1970); Eugene N. Anderson and Pauline R. Anderson, Political Institutions and Social Change in Continental Europe in the Nineteenth Century (1967); Michael Oakeshott (ed.), The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (1939, reissued 1949); and S.E. Finer, Comparative Government (1970, reissued 1974).Useful studies of particular states include J.H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675-1725 (1967, reissued 1980; also published as The Origins of Political Stability, England, 1675-1725); and lie Halevy, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, 6 vol. (1924-34; originally published in French, 5 vol., 1913-32); for France, C.B.A. Behrens, The Ancien Rgime (1967, reissued 1976); George Lefebvre, The French Revolution, 2 vol. (1962-64; originally published in French, 1930); and D.W. Brogan, The French Nation from Napoleon to Ptain (1957, reissued 1961); for Germany, Hans Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience, 1660-1815 (1958, reprinted 1968); A.j. Nicholls, Weimar and the Rise of Hitler, 2nd ed. (1979); Franz Neumann, Behemoth, 2nd ed. (1944, reissued 1963); and Martin Broszat, The Hitler State: The Foundation and Development of the Internal Structure of the Third Reich (1981; originally published in German, 1969); for Italy, Denis Mack Smith, Italy: A Modern History, new rev. ed. (1969); and S.j. Woolf (ed.), The Nature of Fascism (1968); for the Soviet Union, Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (1961, reprinted 1971); Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State, First Phase 1917-1922, 2nd ed. (1977); and Derek J.R. Scott, Russian Political Institutions, 4th ed. (1969); and, for the United States, Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948, reprinted 1974), and The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840 (1969). Hugh Brogan