What are governments for?

The four universal responsibilities of the state

I sometimes find myself in discussions that turn to the question of what governments are really for. Are they just there to serve themselves; to serve the public; or to protect the borders? Should their purposes – and limits – be defined in constitutions? Is the Project 2025 mission of returning to an 18^th century idea of minimal government desirable or feasible?

I’ve had jobs inside city government, several national governments, and one transnational one (the European Commission) and have worked on projects with over 50 governments in six continents. This work prompted me to seek out answers, since if we don’t have good answers as to why government exists we’ll struggle to work out what it should do, or how it should act.

I looked across 5000 years of history, and many different civilisations. From China and India to Europe and Africa and the Americas I found that governments have made claims to four fundamental purposes: to protect people, to support their welfare, to ensure justice and to enable truth.

How they have interpreted these purposes has changed dramatically over time and in different contexts. But these four purposes provide a lasting foundation for governments, and they link closely to what we need as humans to survive and thrive.

Interestingly, I found that other more recent ideas have not been so common, but were rather associated with the West in the modern era: the idea of the state as an expression of identity; the idea of the state as identical to a nation; and the idea of the state as an expression of rights.

Here I set out in more detail how the four more universal purposes and responsibilities have been understood, drawing on examples from across the world and across history.

1.The responsibility to protect

The first moral claim that all states make is that they can protect people from harm. If they fail they forfeit their legitimacy. This is why in the past the responsibility to protect has over-ridden all other concerns, including everyday morality, easily justifying cruelty and deceit in the writings of Nicolo Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and Henry Kissinger.

This duty is at the heart of every state’s implicit contract with its public. It gives any state an underlying character of harsh brutality which reappears at times of threat, [i] and it gives the guardians of this role a distinctively paranoid moral world view. In a different form the primacy of protection from harm frames modern liberalism: in the writings of John Stuart Mill, the only justification for actions against others is self-protection and the only justifiable restraints on liberties are those that prevent harm to others. [ii]

Order is essential not just for life to carry on but also for people to live well. The available data confirm that political stability and order, the rule of law and justice, are decisive to happiness. The lowest ever rate of national happiness was recorded in the Dominican Republic in the early 1960s after the assassination of President Trujillo at a time of chronic disorder.[iii] The highest levels of recorded happiness are generally to be found in stable democracies like Finland, Norway, Switzerland and Denmark. It is hard to overestimate the value of strong, stable, protective and legitimate governance to human well-being.

States’ capacity to protect people from harm varies greatly. Most states do all that they can to protect against aggression from other states. They are also generally vigilant against terrorism which poses a less direct, but more unsettling challenge to states because its deliberate randomness challenges not only security, morale and mutual trust, but also, more subtly, people’s confidence that the world is ordered and rational.

But until recently the extent of the protection they could offer was limited. Even ubiquitous policing is barely a century old in most countries, and only in very recent times have a minority of highly competent states been able to promise some protection from flows of drugs, organised crime or infectious diseases. Their success in doing so has ratcheted public expectations upwards so that areas of life that used to be seen as subject to fate are now expected to be managed, including unsafe cars and dangerous technologies, intrusive messages directed to children, and toxins in foodstuffs.

The expectation that states can protect us from risks extends far beyond the nation’s borders. Threats like climate change, economic downturns and epidemics, the many ‘problems without passports’ - have forced states to pool their sovereignty so that they can better protect their citizens.

Globalisation has also prompted a changed view of responsibilities to protect individual citizens. In the 19^th century imperial states often justified gunboat diplomacy by claiming to be protecting their citizens. Many of these claims were spurious, and there was little most states could realistically do to protect their citizens once they went beyond their borders. But in the modern world it has come to be assumed that states are responsible for protecting their people wherever they are. The Bali nightclub bombing in 2002, for example, prompted official inquiries to find who in the Australian government was to blame – it couldn’t be the result simply of bad luck or factors outside government’s control.

Many of the subtle dynamics of power arise from this basic duty of protection. From the start it justified states in becoming monopolists of force, yet this in turn made them a threat to their people. This is a tension captured well in Aesop’s fable of the horse which is being attacked by the pig and asks for help from the man. The man says that he would like to help, but will have to harness the horse first (in other words, from the very beginning, freedom depends on subjection). Repeatedly dictators have taken refuge in the claim that the community is under threat and that only they can protect it: having taken power, the protectors then become attackers. The exploitation of fears is a recurrent motif in political history: anxiety is the first refuge of the political scoundrel.[iv] Goering advised that ‘the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders . . . All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism’ and Goebbels based his career on the idea that fear was the most powerful tool available to any state. Democratic leaders have also often manipulated fears. After the Irish Fenians set off bombs in London in 1867, for example, the Prime Minister, Disraeli, advocated repealing habeas corpus, and (falsely) claimed that there were 10,000 armed Fenians in London waiting to strike.

Awareness of the potential risks involved in giving protectors unbounded power may explain why in the Chinese tradition there was such profound disdain for warriors, who were left out of the traditional list of the main classes which included scholars, farmers, artisans and merchants. ‘Wu’ or violence was inferior to, and anathema to, the ‘wei’ of civilisation, and had to be constantly kept in check (an idea that helps to explain some of the inherent tensions of Chinese history, and why so many non-Chinese rulers founded dynasties, ruling as warriors over Chinese scholar bureaucracies).[v]

In the West, the same anxieties repeatedly came to the surface. James Madison warned at the time of the American revolution that ‘the fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defence against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad.’ In the 20^th century alone some 170m people are estimated to have been killed by their own governments: over 60m in the USSR, 35m in China under Mao and another 10m by the Kuomintang, over 20m by Germany, and 6m by Japan: a far higher number than the 40m killed by war during the same period. It is entirely appropriate that the word terrorism was first used to describe violence by the state in revolutionary France (Robespierre in 1794 had claimed that virtue and terror are the ‘springs of popular government’, and that virtue without terror was powerless).

Since then state terrorism has been far more deadly than its non-state counterpart, whether promoted within borders (by the Chekha and its descendants, the NKVD, KGB and FSB, the South Africa Defence Force, or the Gestapo) or beyond national borders (by the CIA and KGB, the various terrorist clients of Iran and Syria or the assassins of Mossad). In the Marxist-Leninist tradition there was even pride in the state’s capacity for harshness: Leon Trotsky once wrote a book justifying violence against a people by the state that was published in English as ‘In Defence of Terrorism’.

Many of the heroes of modern democracy dipped their hands in blood to preserve the state: Friedrich Ebert, the leader of Germany’s social democrats, sent troops onto the streets of many cities in 1919 (and was denounced by the Spartakists as ‘the mass executioner of the German proletariat.’) De Gaulle faced down the Algerian rebels in 1961-2 and through guile and force extracted France from its colonial quagmire, and Churchill sent troops to fight striking miners in Britain soon after the First World War. All justified their attacks on one part of the community as essential for the protection of the whole.

Just how far states should go to protect their community has always been a matter of judgement and proportion rather than absolute principle. Until modern times most of the world’s republics and democracies were destroyed by their failure to protect themselves and their citizens. Liberal societies are always likely to be vulnerable to external threats, precisely because they are the ones most likely to marginalise martial values. When in 1933 the students of Oxford University famously voted against fighting for king and country in a debate Adolf Hitler duly took note. War ensued 6 years later and many of the same students fought – and died – for king and country.

Republican France, which had suffered so much from war in 1870-1 and 1914-18 was unwilling to countenance war in the 1930s and disparaged the warmongers and re-armers with disastrous consequences. Most democracies have subsequently learnt the lesson and taken care to train some young men and women to be ruthless killers, some to keep track of armaments and threats and others to keep their antennae attuned to dangers and to specialise in paranoia (and the oldest democracy, Switzerland, has successfully turned defense into a shared responsibility of the state and the people).

So the responsibility to protect can be thought of as a deal. To the people, states make an offer (one that is not easily refused): an offer of order, predictability, reliability and prosperity in exchange for subservience, a minimum of loyalty, the payment of taxes and, at times, other duties. The deal is sustainable because the risks faced by the people and the risks faced by states overlap. For the citizen the greatest risks are those of disorder and violence, whether that violence comes from outside invaders or domestic criminals and bandits. For the state, likewise the greatest risks to its power and prosperity come from disorder whether the sources of that disorder are other state or its own people. Because these risks overlap there is always the basis for a social contract. But this contract can be profoundly unbalanced and every community has at times had to ask whether its fear of rulers is greater or less than its fear of strangers.

2.The responsibility for welfare

The second source of legitimacy for states has been welfare: a responsibility to promote wellbeing and reduce unnecessary suffering. Although families and communities have always looked after their own needs for care and welfare there is also a very long history of state involvement in welfare in all its forms, including programmes to distribute food and alleviate poverty which can be found from third millennium BCE Sumer and Republican Rome to modern Brazil, and there are many examples throughout history of states that have presented themselves, and been presented by philosophers, not just as protectors but as promoters of well-being.

The conscious pursuit of happiness is one of the marks of civilisations that have grown beyond sheer survival. For Socrates, the ‘aim in founding the commonwealth was not to make any one class especially happy but to secure the greatest possible happiness for the community as a whole’. Ashoka described himself in one of his edicts as desiring ‘safety, self-control, justice and happiness for all beings’. The great Islamic philosopher Al Farabi wrote in his classic tenth century book on political philosophy, the ‘Virtuous City’,[vi]that ‘happiness is the good desired for itself; it is never desired to achieve by it something else and there is nothing greater beyond it that a human being can achieve.’ An influential Chinese thinker of the twelfth century, Chen Liang, argued in a similar vein the rightness of whatever ‘satisfied the reasonable desires and needs of the people’ [vii]

The West formalised these ideas a few centuries later. The US declaration of independence promised ‘life liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ and the French constitution of 1793 committed the new nation to the statement that ‘the purpose of society is the common happiness’. In Britain, the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, who argued that the good state is one that achieves the greatest happiness of the greatest number (an ideal almost precisely opposite to that of ‘raison d’etat’), had an extraordinary impact on rulers, and more recently has achieved influence indirectly through modern economics which is now the lingua franca of the global elite. 200 years later the small Asian state of Bhutan even committed its government to maximising gross domestic happiness, an alternative to gross domestic product.

It is one thing to want to make people happy, another to succeed in doing so. For most states the starting point has been economic policy: providing the economy with the mix of discipline and freedom that makes prosperity possible, providing and protecting money, defining and enforcing property rights, and overseeing the rules of trade and exchange. Some states administered economic life very directly: the temples in Sumer distributed grain and beer in precisely calibrated rations; the European empires merged statecraft and exploitation in the East India Company, the Hudson Bay Company and the Compagnie des Habitants, and 20^th century states ran the great infrastructures of rail, electricity and telephones, as well as steel and coal.

But generally states have not needed to command and direct economic activity. Another of Aesop’s fables describes the sun and the wind competing over who could strip a shepherd boy of his cloak. The wind blows and the boy clutches it ever tighter. The sun shines, and he takes it off. The moral is that states do best when they go with the grain of self-interest, rather than using force and command.

Governments’ economic roles are sometimes seen as protections for a negative liberty, a commitment to non-interference on the part of states that will otherwise choke off prosperity. But economic growth has always depended on more than unconstrained self-interest. The conditions for prosperity are not natural: they are deeply unnatural (which is why sustained growth has been so rare) and dependent on careful design and very active management. The great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes described it well in one of his pithiest and most elliptical epigrams: ‘property, a creation of law, does not arise from value, although exchangeable, a matter of fact’. In other words, value does not pre-exist property rights, or the active role of the state: it arises from the very definition and enforcement of those rights. [viii] This is why in economic life, as in daily life, the idea of ‘laissez faire’ is a fiction: true laissez faire would be an anarchy in which the strong dominated the weak.

The responsibility for welfare brings states into fields where moral principles are unavoidably difficult: how to balance freedom and regulation; how much to provide public goods or whether to be the protector and insurer of last resort. Some past rulers – like Ashoka more than two millennia ago - wished to provide health and education for their people, and there have been patchy traditions of health provision in the distant past which belie the modern assumption that ancient states were about nothing more than weapons and war. The great Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna (150 – 250 CE) advised rulers to provide support for doctors and hospitals. One fifth century visitor from China, Faxian, wrote in admiring detail about the public health care he saw in Pataliputra in northern India. Across much of the Muslim world extensive welfare was provided around mosques, paid for by alms. Renaissance Europe witnessed an extended argument about the balance between private charity and public obligations and Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives were amongst the advocates of a greater role for secular authorities in caring for the poor and the sick.[ix] England imposed a national framework of duties on local parishes between 1597 and 1601 along with a power for local authorities to levy taxes for poor relief. This was prompted in part by concerns about vagrancy at a time of social dislocation but was also an attempt to realise Christian values.

This early welfare state was not marginal. It covered some 8% of the population by 1750 and 14% by 1800 and the rising costs which resulted prompted ferocious debate both about how the burden could be contained, and about how welfare could avoid giving the poor incentives to be idle. [x]

In the late 18^th century more radical arguments for welfare gained ground. Condorcet argued that the gross inequalities of the era were the result of the ‘imperfections of the social art", whose final end would be "the abolition of inequality between nations" and "the progress of equality within each nation". Thomas Paine set out a detailed proposal for tax funded social insurance to do away with poverty at roughly the same time. But it was to be another century before these ideas were put into practice. States were then dragged into welfare mainly because of demand from electors. As the mass of the population won the vote they used it to reject the limited liberalism of small states and the rule of law in favour of a state much more suited to their day to day needs: providing pensions, doctors, schools and homes.[xi] States learned that they couldn’t aspire to military prowess or economic dynamism if their people were malnourished, illiterate or vulnerable to disease (four in ten recruits to the British Army in the late 19^th century had to be rejected on grounds of ill health). So insurance was collectivised and pooled, and states evolved into a flotilla of curers, carers, therapists and regulators, some involved in the most intimate details of private life. Within the space of a century the typical employee of governments changed from being a soldier or official, to become a carer involved in direct, face to face service with the public.

Some of the hardest issues concern how far states should go in equalising incomes. As Amartya Sen has shown, famines like those in Ireland in the 1840s and Bengal in the 1940s were not caused by shortages of food. They happened, and still happen, because some people lack property rights and purchasing power, which is in turn usually a reflection of their lack of influence over the state. This is also true more generally: poverty is rarely natural, it usually also reflects conditions of power which is why questions of distribution have so often dominated politics. But how far should the state go? If the state’s job is to maximise wellbeing, economic theory and psychological evidence both show that the happiness gained by a poor family from additional income is greater than for a rich one: relative levels matter and although an increase in one person’s income may make them happier it can make other people more envious and dissatisfied with their lot.[xii] Just how inequality affects life satisfaction is to some extent culturally determined: for example, it appears to have more effect in Europe than in the USA, either because Europeans favour more equal societies, or because the (largely incorrect) perception of higher levels of social mobility in the US reduces the unhappiness caused by inequality.[xiii] But the strong implication is that any duty to promote anything more than material welfare has to entail substantial redistribution from the rich to the poor and deliberate policies to shape the relative incomes and wealth.

The responsibility for welfare is tightly linked to the responsibility to protect: in both areas the state’s role has been to reduce risks, particularly in those fields where individuals cannot protect or insure themselves. In the US, for example, government has at various times insured against unemployment; healthcare in old age; crop failure; floods; fire; bank failure; and inflation.[xiv] In all of these cases common welfare depends on either a social or a political sense of common identity or interest. In some countries people’s willingness to pay for the welfare of others is adversely affected by levels of migration: more diverse societies can be less solidaristic than homogeneous ones. But where there are strong parties and movements of the left even diversity seems to have little impact willingness to share.[xv]

Government involvement in welfare has been encouraged by what could be called ‘generous politics’ – the attempts to extend to strangers the kindness and generosity which people display to their friends and family. For some on the radical left this is all that politics is about; it lies at the heart of the message of the Christian New Testament, in much of the Koran, and of what came to be the political left. It is a dream of compassion, intimacy and care taken to a much larger scale through the state, and it has had a significant effect on state behaviour: according to one well-researched estimate electorates in some developed countries are willing to forego between a quarter and a third of their income to achieve a more equitable distribution,[xvi] which helps to explain the ubiquity of redistribution, from India’s support for the lowest castes, to Europe’s ‘structural programmes’ for the poorest rural and urban areas, and America’s welfare for poor families.

The responsibility to protect and the responsibility for welfare come together most closely in relation to the environment. People have made lives in an extraordinary range of environments from the Arctic to the Sahara without any help from the state. In each they have found a way to live with an ecosystem, and sometimes to shape it, and become acutely dependent on its twists and turns (and our dependence on the environment is honoured in the religions that turn it into deities). But in the most heavily populated areas states have been closely involved in managing environments – promoting irrigation, building canals, or planting forests to prevent erosion. Failure to manage vital environments has been one of the common causes of state collapse, from Uruk in Iraq whose once fertile lands were reduced to desert, to the Akkadian empire (where by 2000 BCE the earth had ‘turned white’) and the great empires of central America. Athens’ ruler Solon in the 6th century BCE banned food exports and the cultivation of steep slopes in a desperate attempt to arrest erosion, and many others earned their legitimacy through the vigour with which they built or maintained systems of irrigation. It was in response to the hellish unregulated growth of cities in the 19^th century that so much of the paraphernalia of planning and public health grew up. In the slums of Mexico City, Mumbai or Lagos much of the provision of water, warmth, shelter and food is organised without the state and there is little or no planning. But this is precisely why they are slums, unsafe, and vulnerable to disease.

If part of the state’s role has been to protect people from the risks of a malign environment its other role has been to make people happier by cultivating a better one. We associate the good life with abundant trees and beautiful landscapes, cities full of parks and piazzas, and modern states have seen fit to provide public parks and protect wildernesses, as well as art galleries and concert halls. A third of the landmass of Australia and New Zealand, the USA and Canada is managed directly or indirectly by government as national parks of various kinds for this reason, and wealthy states spend generously on the public spaces of their great cities, iconic buildings and public art. [xvii]

3.The responsibility for justice

The third consistent source of legitimacy for states is justice: punishing criminals and resolving conflicts. The earliest states dispensed a violent and unequal justice, primarily designed to protect the rich and powerful from the far more numerous poor and weak. One of the first and most resonant pieces of political philosophy is a fragment from the Greek poet Pindar. ‘The law[xviii]’ he wrote ‘sovereign of all, of mortals and immortals, leads with the strongest hand, justifying the most violent.’ In other words, at the birth of the state, violence and the law were fused, violence legitimating the monopoly of violence just as Weber suggested.

Yet all rulers have also presented themselves as the servants of a more universal justice. Hammurabi, the great lawmaker of the ancient middle East, claimed to have derived his laws from the sun god who saw everything that humans did. For Aristotle, the ability to distinguish good and bad, just and unjust, was what distinguished humans from the other animals, and found its greatest expression in a state which could distinguish between good and evil. As states formalised the justice that had previously been organised informally by elders it became a distinct part of the state, free from, and at times superior to executive power. It became impersonal, cool and blind – as in the iconography of a blindfolded figure holding scales, and able to listen (‘audi alteram partem’ - the legal principle of hearing the other side).

The meaning of justice, and of the state’s role in promoting it, has depended on context and culture. The guiding principle of Roman law was that each should be given their due (‘ius suum cuique’) and that what effects everyone should be approved by everyone (‘quod omnes tangit, ab omnibus approbetur’). In other words, no-ones’ interests should be ignored, and no-one should be subject to anyone else. The idea that the law should be even handed galvanised England’s Peasants Revolt in 1281: the rebels demanded the right to stand up in court and speak out against anyone who wronged them, even if that someone was their lord and master.

In India, different castes operated different laws. In China the Emperor dispensed justice without any notion that those on the receiving end had rights. Indeed the Legalists admonished rulers ‘to use the full severity of the law against the unfilial and the unfraternal’ believing that ‘ … the virtue of the rulers was manifested as much in their righteous punishments as in the power of their moral influence’[xix] (and in 16^th century England William Tyndale justified the claim that it ‘is better to have a tyrant as thy king than a shadow: a passive king who does nought himself’ because ‘a tyrant though he do wrong to the good, punishes the vile ….’).

In early modern Europe the struggles over justice prepared the way for democracy and rights. When Frederick the Great wanted to extend the gardens of his palace near Berlin, Sans Souci, he is said to have called a miller who owned a mill overlooking the extension and asked him to sell it. The miller replied that he wanted to keep it for his children. The King said he could take it without compensation, to which the miller replied ‘yes majesty, if our courts did not exist’, and the mill still stands overlooking Sans Souci as a symbol of subordination of royalty to law.

The scope of state justice was traditionally limited to acts of violence, property, family and resources (one of the Polynesian words for law means ‘relating to water’ – a vital area of contention in the distant past and probably in the future). Yet in the western world, and through its influence globally, the scope for justice has expanded to include social justice, global justice, gender justice, intergenerational justice, discrimination and the state’s own procedures. Many more areas of life have been opened up to an essentially moral public argument [xx] , particularly in common law systems where judges have sought to find the unarticulated underlying principles behind particular laws and recast their role as being about guarding principles, rather than simply enforcing the policies that issue forth from legislatures and kings[xxi].

Justice has generally been a monopoly of the state, sometimes shared with religions, but its resilience has often depended on the people. Solon’s law in ancient Athens, for example, required anyone who did not take sides in a civil war to be punished – a law intended to ensure that the whole of society used its weight to pacify warring factions. Today many countries (notably the US and UK) continue to resist a fully professionalized justice system, and hold onto the use of lay magistrates and juries made up of citizens.

4.The responsibility for truth

The fourth source of legitimacy has been the state’s claim to uphold the truths and knowledge vital to the community’s survival. Originally the truths that mattered concerned the cosmos, the climate, hunting grounds or competing tribes (knowledge that reduced the uncertainty of the environment and widened the scope for human sovereignty). Later kings drew legitimacy from their own godlike character and carried out rituals to maintain order in the world and to reinforce religious truths. Today we look to states to support science, evidence and data, and many leaders define themselves through their connection to truths – from Donald Trump’s TruthSocial social media platform to politicians who claim that they ‘follow the science’.

Akbar in 16^th century India was probably the first great leader to promote reason as the highest value of his state, at a time when Islam had much to teach Christianity about tolerance and enlightenment. During the 18^th and 19^th centuries many western governments legitimised themselves by reference to knowledge and reason, with constitutions founded on truths that are taken ‘to be self-evident’ (including the preamble to the failed early 21^st century European Constitution, which acknowledged the primacy of reason). The various professions of engineering, urban planning and public health were corralled around the state, and new curriculums systematised what children needed to know.

Many of the claims made by states were fallacious, self-serving and hypocritical. Talleyrand enjoyed the cynicism of his comment that ‘the truth is whatever is plausibly asserted and confidently maintained’. It is said that if you torture the data enough it will confess to anything. Mao and Kim Il Sung were not content to be the greatest statesmen and poets in human history: they also had to be the greatest scientists (regardless of nature: one of the great slogans of the cultural revolution was: ‘However much we can dream the land will yield’).

The Nazis and (for a brief period) the Stalinists stand out for the degree to which they instrumentalised truth. Goebbels went furthest: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it…’, explaining with even greater candour why it was ‘vitally important for the State to use all its powers to repress dissent; for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie – and thus by extension – the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

But such brusque cynicism was unsustainable. Governors need an authority for their authority[xxii], and that has to come from a claim to truth. A state which did not bother to make any pretence to truth (and even the Nazis laid claim to some truths about history, genetics and identity) would be capable of regulating the day to day conduct of teachers, police, doctors and officials only through fear. [xxiii]

Serving the people

Many virtues matter to states, including consistency and reliability, courage and foresight. But the four claims to legitimacy – protection, welfare, justice and truth – stand out as forming a consistent ethical architecture and a continuous thread, at least of ideals, from the very earliest recorded states to the present day. Together they make up the order that states promise: an order that is safe and prosperous, just and true. Few, if any, states have made no claims in these four areas. Even though they have been reached through many different philosophical paths (widely different societies can agree much more easily on the practical expressions of service than they can on the underlying rationales), there is an unmistakeable common pattern.

So for example, King Ur-Nammu of Ur who reigned around 2100 BCE, promised his people that he would ‘establish equity in the land and banish malediction, violence and strife’ as well as upholding the religious duties of the state and promulgating laws (the rulers of Sumeria were portrayed on seals, sculptures and vases as warriors, sources of fertility and as dispensers of justice). Two thousand years later, around 300 BCE, the first great realist political theorist, Kautilya, adviser to the Mauryan empire, described the duties of the ruler in his book the Arthashastra in much the same ways. He wrote of these as including protection of the state from external aggression; safeguarding the welfare of the people; and maintenance of law and order within the state. He presented these as ethical duties – aspects of rajadharma, the dharma of kings, and described them as rooted in the very nature of the universe. They could also be justified in terms of self-interest because when an ‘unjust king is attacked his people will either topple him or go over to the enemy.’

2000 years later in the modern era, governments in the West generally describe their duties in very similar terms promising security, prosperity and welfare, justice and knowledge in the forms of science and education. Election battles often turn on an argument between the primacy of protection and the primacy of welfare (ancient Athens faced similar choices: when new silver was discovered Themistocles argued that it should be used to build 200 warships, while others wanted to distribute ten drachmas to every family).

The four sources of legitimation correspond, broadly, with ministerial roles and departmental structures (defence and policing; welfare and health; justice; communications and education), and with the professions most associated with states: soldiers and police, the doctors and social workers, regulators and economists, lawyers and judges, scientists and academics. Each profession also has its own stated ideals of service, its restraints on the abuse of power, and its own longstanding arguments about whether professional knowledge is a possession to be exploited or a gift to be shared.

At a more profound level the four correspond with aspects of human nature: the drive for survival; the drive for happiness; the deep-seated dispositions towards justice and fairness (and intense resentment of free riders, exploiters and bullies); and the apparently universal drive to learn and understand.

They also correspond with the ethical syndromes or outlooks that underpin many societies. These include the guardian syndrome of protection; the utilitarianism of maximising the welfare of the greatest number in which ends often justify means; the proceduralism of law, in which the process matters more than the ends; and the scientific reasoning of universities. Each of these syndromes has a distinct view of moral questions, yet in the day-to-day workings of a community they complement each other.

Most states’ claims to legitimacy have been much more cosmetic than real. But their pervasiveness over time and space confirms that although the character of states has changed hugely, as power has become syndicated, professionalized, distributed and networked, the fundamental needs of human communities have not.[xxiv]

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[this is an adapted extract from ‘Good and Bad Power: the ideals and betrayals of government’, published by Penguin. It sits alongside my other writings on government including ‘The Art of Public Strategy’ (Oxford University Press) and ‘Another World is Possible’ (Hurst)]

[i] Jane Jacobs described the morals of protection as a ‘guardian’ moral syndrome, concerned with care for land and territory, taking the long view, anticipation as well as response, vigilance and a degree of paranoia. These values are common amongst armies and aristocracies, civil services and police forces, and can also be found in parts of the modern environmental movement. Jane Jacobs, Systems of Survival, Vintage Press, 1994

[ii] Adam Smith wrote in the same vein that ‘those exertions of the liberty of a few individuals which might endanger the security of the whole society are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments …which have a duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it’.

[iii] It is not hard to speculate about many other, far less happy, states in the past. But national happiness is not something on which data has been collected for very long. Bruno Frey’s work on the economics of happiness is one of many sources on this.

[iv] Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, Brian Roberts (1978), Policing the Crisis: mugging, the state, and law and order, London: Macmillan, 1978; is one classic account of the construction of moral panic for a political end

[v] This argument is expanded in China: a new history, John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, Belknap, Harvard, 1998

[vi] Muhsin Mahdi, AlFarabi and the foundation of Islamic political philosophy, University of Chicago Press 2001, p.128

[vii] Chen Liang, p.2

[viii] Gibbon put it less elliptically: ‘the value of money has been settled by general consent to express our wants and our property, as letters were invented to express our ideas … and both these institutions, by giving more active energy to the powers and passions of human nature, have contributed to multiply the objects they were designed to represent.’

[ix] HCM Michielse ‘Policing the poor; J.L. Vives and the 16^th century origins of modern social administration, Social Service Review, 64 (1) 1-21

[x] Howard Glennerster …

[xi] In the century after 1870 there is only a weak correlation between left of centre governments and public spending. R.Middleton, Government versus the market: the growth of the public sector, economic management and British economc performance, c1890-1079, Cheltenham, 1996

[xii] This data is collected in Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, Nick Donovan and David Halpern with Richard Sargeant, Life Satisfaction: the State of Knowledge and Implications for Government, 2002.

[xiii] Seen through a moral lens the appeal of materialism often seems suspect. Yet as the great English poet W.H. Auden warned ‘as a rule it was the pleasure-haters who became unjust’. W. H. Auden, Voltaire at Ferney. Another Time, Poems, London: Faber and Faber, 1940.

[xiv] Joseph Stiglitz, The Economics of the Public sector, 3^rd edition, Norton, London 2000, p 81

[xv] Alesina and others have used detailed statistical analyses to argue that the basis for welfare deals is likely to be undermined by mass migration. Racial divisions provide a device for politicians to exploit, and undermine the basis for substantial spending on social security. However more detailed work shows that the picture is not as simple as this. In those European countries where the left has traditionally been strong the impact of race disappears. A Alesina an E Glaeser, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe, OUP, Oxford, 2004.; Peter Taylor Gooby Is the future American; or can left politics preserve European welfare states from erosion through growing racial diversity? Journal of Social policy, vol 34, 4, October 2005.

[xvi] A Atkinson and J Stiglitz, Lectures in Public Economics, McGraw Hill, New York, 1980

[xvii] One of the best recent symbols of the responsibility for welfare is the recovery of Cheongyecheon river in Seoul from underneath an urban highway to provide a 6 km trail of walkways and fountains, waterfalls and sculptures through the city centre. Strikingly designed, it combines nature and urbanity in equal measure as the showcase for the aggressive leadership of the city’s mayor Lee Myung Bak.

[xviii] The word in Greek was ‘nomos’. It is usually translated as meaning ‘law’: but here it means something prior to law, the imposition of rules by force.

[xix] Benjamin Schwartz China’s Cultural Values 1985, Arizona State University Center for Asian Studies.

[xx] This expansion of justice has provided a parallel route for citizens to exercise power alongside the procedures of democracy, and it has ensured that the idea of justice remains dynamic, reaching forward to fairer ideals, as well as referring backwards to precedents. Justice has become in this sense more political, and more tied into the conversations of society, even as it has become more independent from formal structures of representative governance. Even John Rawls, author of the most comprehensive theory of justice in liberalism, came to recognise that any viable conception of justice needed to be ‘political not metaphysical’, by which he meant that people might more easily agree on the applications of justice than on the fundamental principles from which they derived.

[xxi] This has been the powerful drive of Ronald Dworkin’s work through many books, including Taking Rights Seriously, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977, and Law’s Empire, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1986. It was also the stance taken in English law, most recently by Lord Denning.

[xxii] See Nikolas Rose ‘Freedom …. ‘

[xxiii] Dictatorships are rarely very comfortable about the truths they rest on which may be why their secret policemen and torturers usually make motive rather than truth the issue, so that behind every question, every point of view their priority was to ferret out the purpose rather than the facts.

[xxiv] Some possible candidates have been excluded from this list of consistent duties. To modern eyes one of the defining roles of the state is that it marks out people’s identity. Yet this was not an important role for pre-modern states which made little claims on people’s sense of themselves, and none saw it as essential to their legitimacy. The idea that states should be based on the boundaries of nations is a modern one. So is the notion that all individuals have identical rights. These are undoubtedly important ideas that are constitutive of many modern states, and whose genealogy can be traced back to the ancient world. But they too cannot be claimed as fundamental duties that stretch across time and space. Samuel Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, Oxford University Press, 1997.