Essential Question

• How did early ideas impact the development of U.S. government?

The Principles of Government

Aristotle

“If liberty and equality, as is thought by some are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.”

Definition of a State

• A political community that occupies a definite territory and has an organized government with the power to make and enforce laws without approval from any higher authority.

Beginnings of Government?

• Force Theory – government emerged when people came under the power of a person or group by force

Athens

Functioned as a polis or Greek city-state

Used an Assembly of males over 18 years old

Decisions made by majority vote

Roman Republic

• The Senate governed the Republic

• Senators were elected by the people

• Two consuls acted as heads of state

Divine Right Theory

• God chose certain people to rule by divine right

• Examples?

Niccolo Machiavelli

• Renaissance political thinker

Machiavelli

“When sovereignty grew to be hereditary and no longer elective, hereditary sovereigns began to degenerate from their ancestors, and quitting worthy courses, took up the notion that princes had nothing to do but to surpass the rest of the world in sumptuous display and wantonness.”

Social Contract

• Proposed by Thomas Hobbes

• People surrendered to the state to maintain order

• The state agreed to protect its citizens

John Locke

• People are endowed with natural rights

• Life, liberty, and property

• If gov’t fails to protect these rights, what happens?

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government

“Government being for the preservation of every man’s right and property, by preserving him from the violence or injury of others, is for the good of the governed.”

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government

“The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all states of created beings capable of law, where there is no law, there is no freedom.”

Baron de Montesquieu

• Wrote The Spirit of Laws

• There should be separation of powers in government with checks and balances

The Spirit of Laws

“When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau

• Wrote The Social Contract

• People agree to obey laws in exchange for government agreeing to protect the rights and equality of people

William Blackstone

• Wrote Commentaries on the Laws of England

• Detailed English common law

• Used for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution