Explain the purpose of government and analyze how government powers are acquired, used, and justified.

("Thomas Hobbes," Wikipedia, ca. 1600)

We began this course in lesson 1 by identifying the purposes and role of government. Throughout the course, you have learned about how people participate in the political process and govern themselves. In the United States of America, the government is, as Abraham Lincoln declared, “of the people, by the people and for the people." This means that the government was founded and created out of the will and consent of the people. Once set in motion, the government would be staffed by the people, and government would be accountable to and work for the people.

You have also learned about the Revolutionary War, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitutional Convention. These events and the others that occurred with them defined the “Founding Era” of the American republic. However, the Founding is more than a series of events; the American Founding is a unique example of how governments can be created and endowed with power. But where did governmental power come from? Was it created out of thin air? Was it transferred from one person or group to another?

To answer these questions, it is helpful to review the political writings of two long-dead English philosophers. They too asked where governmental power came from, how it should be used, and how the use of power by government is justified. Instead of answering these questions directly, both men began with a rather peculiar question: What would the world be like if there were no government?

In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) conjured up a time and place before governments existed. Humankind before the invention of government, Hobbes believed, was in a “state of nature” in which the life-sustaining needs and passions of individuals dictated their interactions with each other. With no governmental authority to settle disputes between individuals, each person acted as a sovereign—an authority that answers to no one but itself. Because every individual in the state of nature was autonomous and because food and other items people wanted were scarce, life in the state of nature would be characterized by an incessant war of “every man against every man.” It was an existence that Hobbes characterized as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”