Justification for the state

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The justification of the state is a term that refers to the source of legitimate authority for the state or government. Typically, a justification of the state explains why the state should exist, and what a legitimate state should or should not be able to do.

There is no single, universally accepted justification of the state. Most political ideologies have their own justifications, and thus their own vision of what constitutes a legitimate state.

The following are just a few examples.

1 Transcendent sovereignty
2 The social contract
3 Public Goods
4 See also
5 Sources and references

[edit] Transcendent sovereignty

In feudal Europe, the most widespread justification of the state was the divine right of kings, which stated that monarchs draw their power from God, and the state should be only an apparatus that puts the monarch's will into practice. The legitimacy of the state's lands was due to that the lands were personal possessions of the monarch. The divine right theory combined with primogeniture became a theory of hereditary monarchy, in the nation states of the early modern period. The Holy Roman Empire was not a state in that sense.

The political ideas current in China at that time involved the idea of the mandate of heaven. It was similar to the divine right in that it placed the ruler in a divine position, as the link between Heaven and Earth, but it differed from the divine right of kings in that it did not assume that the connection between a dynasty and the state was permanent. Inherent in the concept was that a ruler held the mandate of heaven only as long as he provided good government; if he did not, heaven would withdrawn its mandate and he would be overthrown and whoever restored order would hold the new mandate.

In a theocracy, the divine will's primate over human laws is even more stringent, as it makes political authority subservient to the religious leadership

[edit] The social contract

In the period of the eighteenth century usually called the Enlightenment, a new justification of the European state developed: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's contrat social 'social contract' theory states that governments draw their power from the governed: its 'sovereign' people (usually a certain ethnic group, and the state's limits are legitimated theoretically as that people's lands, although that is often not, rarely exactly, the case), that no person should have absolute power, and that a legitimate state is one which meets the needs and wishes of its citizens. This theory eventually eliminated the belief in the divine right of kings, and formed the basis for modern democracy.

[edit] Public Goods

This is an example of the theoretical thinking shifting the emphasis from faith and theoretical principles such as sovereignty to the socio-economic logic, as Karl Marx did. Thus modern political theorists typically legitimize the state with two major ideas: redistribution and the provision of public goods. In The Limits of Government, David Schmidtz (an economist) takes on the second of these ideas. While a market system may allow self-interested individuals to create and allocate many goods optimally, there exists a class of "collective" - or "public goods" that are not produced adequately in a market system. These collective goods are goods that all individuals want but for whose production it is often not individually rational for people voluntarily to do their part to secure a collectively rational outcome. The state can step in and force us all to contribute toward the production of these goods, and we can all thereby be made better off.