Purpose of government

One of the central questions of political philosophy is the purpose of government. Many great political philosophers, from Plato to John Rawls, have concerned themselves with this question.

One common formulation is that the purpose of the state is to protect rights and to preserve justice. A countervailing formulation is that government exists to protect the privileges of a few, preserving a state of injustice for the majority. But such propositions raise more questions than it answers. Which and whose rights? What sort of justice? There are, after all, many different conceptions of what rights are, and what constitutes justice.

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. 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 all human community possible when these things are replaced. [1] Capitalism and statism sees taxes and the nation-state as necessary for property, which is in turn held to be necessary for "self ownership". 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 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.

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.

See also

• Justification for the state
• Anarchism