ABSTRACT
Political science has identified three basic ways in which polities come into existence: conquest, organic development, and covenant. Polities whose origins are covenantal reflect the exercise of constitutional choice and broad-based participation in constitutional design. The organic model is closely related to the concept of natural law in the political order. Although both the Pharaonic models have been judged illegitimate in contemporary Western society, modem and feudal totalitarian theories, particularly fascism and Nazism, represented an attempt to give the comprehensive state based on hierarchical rule a certain theoretical legitimacy. Organic polities that essentially develop by accident and are marked by their center-periphery configuration, while also elite-ruled, organize their mechanisms of government differently. The United States is the paradigmatic modem new society. Israel falls squarely within the "new society" model, though, like the other new societies, it departs from the American paradigm in those particulars that reflect its own unique historical experience.
