Government lesson 2

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Lesson 2 Natural Law, Government, and the State

What Makes a State?

How are Canada and the United States different? How are they similar? Each state has different people living in it, different territory under its control, and a different form of government that makes domestic and foreign policy. However, these differences are also similarities. In fact, there are four characteristics common to all states: population, territory, sovereignty, and government. Think of any state in the world today and you can observe these characteristics. In this lesson, you will learn more about each characteristic of a state and how states originate.

Theories of Government Origin

History proves that there is no single model or origin of the state. Have you heard the phrase to the victor go the spoils? In times of war, the victorious state often claimed the opponent’s territory, forcing its rule over a population and claiming sovereignty. Other times, a state arose from a small group of people, like a tribe, occupying a territory and claiming it for the group, thereby creating a sovereign state. There are four theories of how states came to be: force theory, divine right of kings theory, social contract theory, and evolutionary theory.

The Force Theory

Many scholars have long believed that the state was born of force. They hold that one person or a small group claimed control over an area and forced all within it to submit to that person's or group's rule. When that rule was established, all the basic elements of the state—population, territory, sovereignty, and government—were present.

The Evolutionary Theory

Others claim that the state developed naturally out of the early family. They hold that the primitive family, of which one person was the head and thus the “government,” was the first stage in political development. Over countless centuries, the original family became a network of related families, a clan. In time, the clan became a tribe. When the tribe first turned to agriculture and gave up its nomadic, wandering ways, tying itself to the land, the state was born.

The Divine Right of Kings Theory

The theory of divine right of kings was widely accepted in much of the Western world from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. It held that God created the state and that God had given those of royal birth a “divine right” to rule. The people were bound to obey their ruler as they would God; opposition to “the divine right of kings” was both treason and a mortal sin.

During the seventeenth century, philosophers began to question this theory. Much of the thought upon which present-day democracies rest began as a challenge to the theory of divine right of kings.

The notion of divine right of kings was not unique to European history. The rulers of many ancient civilizations, including the Chinese, Egyptian, Aztec, and Mayan civilizations, were held to be gods or to have been chosen by the gods. The Japanese emperor, the mikado, governed by divine right of kings until 1945.

The Social Contract Theory

In terms of the American political system, the most significant of the major political theories on the origin of the state is that of the “social contract.” Philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, James Harrington (1611–1677), and John Locke (1632–1704) in England and Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) in France developed this theory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Hobbes wrote that in earliest history humans lived in unbridled freedom, that is in a “state of nature,” in which no government existed and no person was subject to any superior power. That which people could take by force belonged to them. However, all people were similarly free in that state of nature. No authority existed to protect one person from the aggressive actions of another. Thus, individuals were only as secure as their own physical strength and intelligence could make them.

Human beings overcame their unpleasant condition, says the social contract theory, by agreeing with one another to create a state. By contract, people within a given area agreed to give up to the state as much power as was needed to promote the safety and well-being of all. In the contract (that is, through a constitution), the members of the state created a government to exercise the powers they had voluntarily given to the state.