Justification for the state
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The justification of the state refers to the source of
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 constitutions 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
The political ideas current in
Self-aggrandizement
In
The social contract
In the period of the eighteenth century, usually called
Public goods
While a market system may allow self-interested firms 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, such as infrastructure or social services. Market forces may not be sufficient to incentivize rational individuals to adequately produce these public goods; therefore, coercive institutions must intervene and guarantee the production of such public goods, whether by assuming their production under the state (e.g., the building of public roads) or by introducing market forces to incentivize their production in the private sector (e.g., providing subsidies for electric vehicles).
Political ideologies
It is on those questions that one can find the differences between conservatism, 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.
Arguments against a State
Anarchism claims that the community of those fighting to create a new society must themselves constitute a stateless society. 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.[4]
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. Some institutions can be said to exist only because the government provides the framework for their existence; for instance,
See also
- Anarchism
- Consequentialist justifications of the state
- Constitutional economics
- Monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force
- Rechtsstaat
- Rule of law
- Rule according to higher law
- Philosophy of law
- Political philosophy
- Political philosophy of Immanuel Kant
References
- ^ "Divine right of kings | Definition, History, & Facts | Britannica". www.britannica.com. Retrieved 2022-12-18.
- ^ 1 Samuel 8:5
- ^
ISBN 9781400823253. Retrieved 2017-11-18.
From the middle of the thirteenth century until the beginning of the sixteenth, the pursuit of civic glory [...] was celebrated as the city-state's primary raison d'etre.
- ^ "Prole.info". Archived from the original on 2007-03-12. Retrieved 2007-05-16.