ABSTRACT
Books galore have been written about both of the topics of state and government, and the history of political philosophy is replete with definitions and analyses which are the recognizable outcome of special pleading on behalf of some favoured doctrine. Rousseau is a celebrated culprit. For him, the ‘state’ is the body of people, each of whom, as citizens, compose the sovereign of a directly democratic republic, and every one of whom as subjects must obey its laws. By contrast, the ‘government’ is the executive branch of the republic, the civil service which has the task of putting into effect the laws of the sovereign. Rousseau had his own reasons for employing this idiosyncratic vocabulary (not least that he was thus able to put monarchy and aristocracy (types of government, both, as he defined them) in their proper place as forms of executive service to the people) and no harm is done so long as one reads him carefully and attends to his definitions.1 Outside this specific context these definitions are tendentious.
