ABSTRACT
The fundamental purpose of government-indeed, its first purpose-is to establish and maintain order. As many political thinkers have noted, human existence before the establishment of governments was chaotic and anarchic. Writing in the seventeenth century, the British political theorist Thomas Hobbes noted in his Leviathan that life in such a “state of nature” was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The only “law” in this situation was that of self-preservation, when one could expect only the “war” of “every man, against every man.” To stave off such an anarchic condition, people formed governments, to which citizens traded some of their freedom, including the “freedom” to kill or be killed, in exchange for the order of civil society. In such a “civil state,” according to Hobbes, “there is a power set up to constrain those that would otherwise violate their faith.”
