The Nature of Government by Ayn Rand

A government is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area.

Do men need such an institution -- and why?

Since man's mind is his basic tool of survival, his means of gaining knowledge to guide his actions - the basic con­dition he requires is the freedom to think and to act ac­cording to his rational judgment. This does not mean that a man must live alone and that a desert island is the environment best suited to his needs. Men can derive enormous benefits from dealing with one another. A social environment is most conducive to their successful survival - but only on certain conditions.

"The two great values to be gained from social exis­tence are: knowledge and trade. Man is the only species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge from generation to generation; the knowledge potentially available to man is greater than any one man could be­gin to acquire in his own lifespan; every man gains an incalculable benefit from the knowledge discovered by others. The second great benefit is the division of labor: it enables a man to devote his effort to a particular field of work and to trade with others who specialize in other fields. This form of cooperation allows all men who take part in it to achieve a greater knowledge, skill and pro­ductive return on their effort than they could achieve if each had to produce everything he needs, on a desert island or on a self-sustaining farm.

"But these very benefits indicate, delimit and define what kind of men can be of value to one another and in what kind of society: only rational, productive, indepen­dent men in a rational, productive, free society." ( The Objectivist Ethics.)

A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment - a society that sets up a conflict between its edicts and the requirements of man's nature­ is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule. Such a society destroys all the values of human coexistence, has no possible justi­fication and represents, not a source of benefits, but the deadliest threat to man's survival. Life on a desert island is safer than and incomparably preferable to existence in Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.

If men are to live together in a peaceful, productive, rational society and deal with one another to mutual benefit, they must accept the basic social principle with­out which no moral or civilized society is possible: the principle of individual rights. (See my articles on rights in the April and June 1963 issues of The Objectivist Newsletter.)

To recognize individual rights means to recognize and accept the conditions required by man's nature for his proper survival.

Man's rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment.

The precondition of a civilized society is the barring of physical force from social relationships - thus establish­ing the principle that if men wish to deal with one an­other, they may do so only by means of reason: by discus­sion, persuasion and voluntary, uncoerced agreement.

The necessary consequence of man's right to life is his right to self-defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initi­ate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physi­cal force a moral imperative.

If some "pacifist" society renounced the retaliatory use of force, it would be left helplessly at the mercy of the first thug who decided to be immoral. Such a society would achieve the opposite of its intention: instead of abolishing evil, it would encourage and reward it.

If a society provided no organized protection against force, it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his home into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his door - or to join a protective gang of citizens who would fight other gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the degeneration of that society into the chaos of gang-rule, i.e., rule by brute force, into the perpetual tribal warfare of prehistorical savages.

An Objective Code

The use of physical force - even its retaliatory use­ cannot be left at the discretion of individual citizens. Peaceful coexistence is impossible if a man has to live under the constant threat of force to be unleashed against him by any of his neighbors at any moment. Whether his neighbors' intentions are good or bad, whether their judgment is rational or irrational, whether they are moti­vated by a sense of justice or by ignorance or by preju­dice or by malice - the use of force against one man can­ not be left to the arbitrary decision of another.

Visualize, for example, what would happen if a man missed his wallet, concluded that he had been robbed, broke into every house in the neighborhood to search it, and shot the first man who gave him a dirty look, tak­ing the look to be a proof of guilt.

The retaliatory use of force requires objective rules of evidence to establish that a crime has been committed and to prove who committed it, as well as objective rules to define punishments and enforcement procedures. Men who attempt to prosecute crimes, without such rules, are a lynch mob. If a society left the retaliatory use of force in the hands of individual citizens, it would degenerate into mob rule, lynch law and an endless series of bloody private feuds or vendettas.

If physical force is to be barred from social relation­ships, men need an institution charged with the task of protecting their rights under an objective code of rules. This is the task of a government - of a proper govern­ment - its basic task, its only moral justification and the reason why men do need a government.

A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control - i.e., under objectively defined laws.

The fundamental difference between private action and governmental action - a difference thoroughly ig­nored and evaded today - lies in the fact that a govern­ment holds a monopoly on the legal use of physical force. It has to hold such a monopoly, since it is the agent of restraining and combatting the use of force; and for that very same reason, its actions have to be rigidly defined, delimited and circumscribed; no touch of whim or ca­ price should be permitted in its performance; it should be an impersonal robot, with the law as its only motive power. If a society is to be free, its government has to be controlled.

Under a proper social system, a private individual is legally free to take any action he pleases (so long as he does not violate the rights of others) , while a govern­ment official is bound by law in his every official act. A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden)· a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted.

This is the means of subordinating "might" to "right."

This is the American concept of "a government of laws and not of men."

The nature of the laws proper to a free society and the source of its government's authority are both to be de­rived from the nature and purpose of a proper govern­ment. The basic principle of both is indicated in The Declaration of Independence: "to secure these [individ­ual] rights, governments are instituted among men, de­riving their just powers from the consent of the gov­erned . . .''

Since the protection of individual rights is the only proper purpose of a government, it is the only proper subject of legislation: all laws must be based on individ­ual rights and aimed at their protection. All laws must be objective (and objectively justifiable): men must know clearly, and in advance of taking an action, what the law forbids them to do (and why) , what constitutes a crime and what penalty they will incur if they commit it.

The source of the government's authority is "the consent of the governed." This means that the government is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of the citizens; it means that the government as such has no rights except the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific purpose.

There is only one basic principle to which an individ­ual must consent if he wishes to live in a free, civilized society: the principle of renouncing the use of physical force and delegating to the government his right of physi­cal self-defense, for the purpose of an orderly, objective, legally defined enforcement. Or, to put it another way, he must accept the separation of force and whim (any whim, including his own).

Now what happens in case of a disagreement between two men about an undertaking in which both are in­volved?

In a free society, men are not forced to deal with one another. They do so only by voluntary agreement and, when a time element is involved, by contract. If a con­tract is broken by the arbitrary decision of one man, it may cause a disastrous financial injury to the other - and the victim would have no recourse except to seize the of­ fender's property as compensation. But here again, the use of force cannot be left to the decision of private in­dividuals. And this leads to one of the most important and most complex functions of the government: to the function of an arbiter who settles disputes among men according to objective laws.

Criminals are a small minority in any semi-civilized society. But the protection and enforcement of contracts through courts of civil law is the most crucial need of a peaceful society; without such protection, no civilization could be developed or maintained.

Man cannot survive, as animals do, by acting on the range of the immediate moment. Man has to project his goals and achieve them across a span of time; he has to calculate his actions and plan his life long-range. The better a man's mind and the greater his knowledge, the longer the range of his planning. The higher or more complex a civilization, the longer the range of activity it requires - and, therefore, the longer the range of con­tractual agreements among men, and the more urgent their need of protection for the security of such agree­ments.

Even a primitive barter society could not function if a man agreed to trade a bushel of potatoes for a basket of eggs and, having received the eggs, refused to deliver the potatoes. Visualize what this sort of whim-directed action would mean in an industrial society where men deliver a billion-dollars-worth of goods on credit, or con­tract to build multi-million-dollar structures, or sign ninety-nine-year leases.

A unilateral breach of contract involves an indirect use of physical force: it consists, in essence, of one man re­ceiving the material values, goods or services of another, then refusing to pay for them and thus keeping them by force (by mere physical possession) , not by right - i.e., keeping them without the consent of their owner. Fraud involves a similarly indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values without their owner's consent, under false pretenses or false promises. Extortion is an­other variant of an indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values, not in exchange for values, but by the threat of force, violence or injury.

Some of these actions are obviously criminal. Others, such as a unilateral breach of contract, may not be crim­inally motivated, but may be caused by irresponsibility and irrationality. Still others may be complex issues with some claim to justice on both sides. But whatever the case may be, all such issues have to be made subject to objectively defined laws and have to be resolved by an impartial arbiter, administering the laws, i.e., by a judge (and a jury, when appropriate) .

Observe the basic principle governing justice in all these cases: it is the principle that no man may obtain any values from others without the owners' consent­ and, as a corollary, that a man's rights may not be left at the mercy of the unilateral decision, the arbitrary choice, the irrationality, the whim of another man.

Such, in essence, is the proper purpose of a govern­ment: to make social existence possible to men, by pro­tecting the benefits and combating the evils which men can cause to one another.

Police, Military, and Courts

The proper functions of a government fall into three broad categories, all of them involving the issues of physi­cal force and the protection of men's rights: the police, to protect men from criminals - the armed services, to protect men from foreign invaders - the law courts, to settle disputes among men according to objective laws.

These three categories involve many corollary and derivative issues - and their implementation in practice, in the form of specific legislation, is enormously complex. It belongs to the field of a special science: the philosophy of law. Many errors and many disagreements are possible in the field of implementation, but what is essential here is the principle to be implemented: the principle that the purpose of law and of government is the protec­tion of individual rights.

Today, this principle is forgotten, ignored and evaded. The result is the present state of the world, with man­kind's retrogression to the lawlessness of absolutist tyran­ny, to the primitive savagery of rule by brute force.

In unthinking protest against this trend, some people are raising the question of whether government as such is evil by nature and whether anarchy is the ideal social system. Anarchy, as a political concept, is a naive floating abstraction: for all the reasons discussed above, a society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would pre­cipitate it into the chaos of gang warfare. But the possi­bility of human immorality is not the only objection to anarchy: even a society whose every member were fully rational and faultlessly moral, could not function in a state of anarchy; it is the need of objective laws and of an arbiter for honest disagreements among men that ne­cessitates the establishment of a government.

A recent variant of anarchistic theory, which is be­fuddling some of the younger advocates of freedom, is a weird absurdity called "competing governments." Accept­ing the basic premise of the modern statists - who see no difference between the functions of government and the functions of industry, between force and production, and who advocate government ownership of business - the proponents of "competing governments" take the other side of the same coin and declare that since competition is so beneficial to business, it should also be applied to govern­ment. Instead of a single, monopolistic government, they declare, there should be a number of different governments in the same geographical area, competing for the allegiance of individual citizens, with every citizen free to "shop" and to patronize whatever government he chooses.

Remember that forcible restraint of men is the only service a government has to offer. Ask yourself what a competition in forcible restraint would have to mean.

One cannot call this theory a contradiction in terms, since it is obviously devoid of any understanding of the terms "competition" and "government." Nor can one call it a floating abstraction, since it is devoid of any con­tact with or reference to reality and cannot be concretized at all, not even roughly or approximately.

One illustra­tion will be sufficient: suppose Mr. Smith, a customer of Government A, suspects that his next-door neighbor, Mr. Jones, a customer of Government B, has robbed him; a squad of Police A proceeds to Mr. Jones' house and is met at the door by a squad of Police B, who declare that they do not accept the validity of Mr. Smith's complaint and do not recognize the authority of Government A. What happens then? You take it from there.

The History of Government

The evolution of the concept of "government" has had a long, tortuous history. Some glimmer of the government's proper function seems to have existed in every or­ganized society, manifesting itself in such phenomena as the recognition of some implicit (if often non-existent) difference between a government and a robber-gang - the aura of respect and of moral authority granted to the government as the guardian of "law and order" - the fact that even the most evil types of government found it nec­essary to maintain some semblance of order and some pretense at justice, if only by routine and tradition, and to claim some sort of moral justification for their power, of a mystical or social nature. Just as the absolute mon­archs of France had to invoke "The Divine Right of Kings," so the modern dictators of Soviet Russia have to spend fortunes on propaganda to justify their rule in the eyes of their enslaved subjects.

In mankind's history, the understanding of the gov­ernment's proper function is a very recent achievement: it is only two-hundred years old and it dates from the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution. Not only did they identify the nature and the needs of a free so­ciety, but they devised the means to translate it into practice. A free society-like any other human product­ cannot be achieved by random means, by mere wishing or by the leaders' "good intentions." A complex legal sys­tem, based on objectively valid principles, is required

to make a society free and to keep it free - a system that does not depend on the motives, the moral character or the intentions of any given official, a system that leaves no opportunity, no legal loophole for the development of tyranny.

The American system of checks and balances was just such an achievement. And although certain contradic­tions in the Constitution did leave a loophole for the growth of statism, the incomparable achievement was the concept of a constitution as a means of limiting and re­stricting the power of the government.

Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Con­stitution is a limitation on the government, not on pri­vate individuals - that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the govern­ment - that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens' protection against the govern­ment.

The Law Perverted

Now consider the extent of the moral and political in­ version in today's prevalent view of government. Instead of being a protector of man's rights, the government is becoming their most dangerous violator; instead of guarding freedom, the government is establishing slavery; instead of protecting men from the initiators of physical force, the government is initiating physical force and co­ercion in any manner and issue it pleases; instead of serv­ing as the instrument of objectivity in human relation­ships, the government is creating a deadly, subterranean reign of uncertainty and fear, by means of non-objective laws whose interpretation is left to the arbitrary decisions of random bureaucrats; instead of protecting men from injury by whim, the government is arrogating to itself the power of unlimited whim - so that we are fast approach­ing the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

It has often been remarked that in spite of its material progress, mankind has not achieved any comparable de­gree of moral progress. That remark is usually followed by some pessimistic conclusion about human nature. It is true that the moral state of mankind is disgracefully low. But if one considers the monstrous moral inversions of the governments (made possible by the altruist - collectiv­ist morality) under which mankind has had to live through most of its history, one begins to wonder how men have managed to preserve even a semblance of civi­lization, and what indestructible vestige of self-esteem has kept them walking upright on two feet.

One also begins to see more clearly the nature of the political principles that have to be accepted and advo­cated, as part of the battle for man's intellectual Renais­sance.


This article -- by the author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead -- appeared in the December, 1963 issue of The Objectivist Newsletter, and was reprinted by permission in the March, 1964 Freeman. Copyright © 1963 by The Objectivist Newsletter, Inc., 120 East 34th Street, New York 16, N. Y.