Government

From Hobson's Choice

A group of social institutions whose existence (including revenues) are guaranteed by the state. The state is a patron of government; it is not the government itself.

Because of close contact with the raw power of the state, government employees are usually the most trenchant critics of the state.

Context

The terms "government" and "state" are often used interchangeably, but they actually refer to different things. Textbooks on political science differ on the exact wording,^[1] but the general sense is that the state represents an embodiment of power in some form, whereas the government consists of what the state needs to accomplish. Another example is provided by anarchist philosophers, who had a problem with establishing precisely what they were against, but identified the state as an inherently oppressive force (with its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence), while identifying "self-government" (or intensely decentralized government) as the ideal.^[2] It seems that while "the state" implies the sort of decisive, perpetual power of a sovereign actor, "government" is essentially the activity of governing, i.e., administering and regulating.

In mechanical engineering, "governors" are devices that control some part of the machinery; an example are brakes activated by excessive speed of revolution on a shaft, as by centrifugal weights. In Victorian usage, youths were admonished to "govern themselves," i.e., to ensure their own liberty by behaving with self-restraint. The idea implied here is that "governing" implies managing, economy, planning, and guidance. In the 19th century, government was associated with the enforcement of laws and contracts, and also the regulation of credit as the chief component of the money supply. By the 1930's, government was understood to include the power to rectify general crises, particularly industrial crises (now known as "recessions" or "depressions").

A crucial component of the modern sense of "government" was the result of the Civil Rights Movement (USA), which introduced a new role of the government (seconded international human rights organizations): that of assisting in the moral reformation of the social order. In the period after 1933, government came to be associated with a vast range of social programs designed to eliminate the concentration of economic power, and to shift the balance of institutional power more towards the state and the democratic polity.

Notes

1. ↑ Examples include James Wilford Garner, Political Science and Government, American Book Company (1928), p.41'ff; Westel W. Willoughby, An Examination of the Nature of the State Macmillan (1911), p.8, distinguishes between the state as an abstraction and the government as the concrete machinery of state power.
2. ↑ The essential anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century Freedom Press of London (1923, tran. John B. Robinson; 1851), who railed against government per se, but elsewhere wrote that decentralized government was the essence of his political philosophy. Nearly all anarchist writers I have read equivocate between the state (whose power is always described as arising from violence) and government (which is idealistically to be decentralized). Under leftwing anarchism, the problem arises of administering the commons, which includes all means of production.

James R MacLean (01:29, 15 March 2008 (PDT))