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The Ends of Government*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Charles E. Merriam
Charles E. Merriam
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

The ends of government may be stated as follows: (1) external security, (2) internal order, (3) justice, (4) general welfare, and (5) freedom.

To the state, which is the name usually applied to independent political associations, these ends are accorded on the basis of observation and reflection. They may be summed up under the term the “common weal,” or the common good. This assumes that there is a community, made up of human personalities, that there are purposes, values, and interests in common, that there is a commonly accepted organization for carrying out these common purposes.

It cannot be said that these functions are the property or responsibility of the state alone. They are shared by other agencies of human society, and without their coöperation the political society can do little. The state provides a broad framework within which other societies and persons may operate more effectively, and undertakes common functions which it can more conveniently carry on, than other associations.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , February 1944 , pp. 21 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1944

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References

1 See chapter on “The Survival of the Fittest” in Merriam, Political Power.

2 See “Law Among the Outlaws” in Political Power.

3 James Burnham, The Machiavellians.

4 See Wright's, Quincy massive volumes on War (1942)Google Scholar; Vagts, Alfred, History of Militarism (1937)Google Scholar; Earle, Edward Mead, Makers of Modern Strategy; Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler (1943)Google Scholar; “The Organization of Violence,” in Merriam, , Prologue to Politics (1939), pp. 1–22.Google Scholar

5 See Beardsley Ruml on “homefulness,” in his Government, Business, and Values.

6 See Merriam, Public and Private Government, Chap. III, “New Meanings of Organization.”

7 See Galsworthy's Justice for a series of difficult cases on the border-lines of exact justice.

8 See the exposition of justice by Plato in the Republic and by Aristotle in his Politics.

9 What is “justiciable” is, to be sure, often a more difficult problem than the solution of a problem itself. At what point the protection of person or property comes within the purview of the law is a perennial source of litigation, and of legislation as well.

10 Among studies in the field of the relation of the state to the freedom of the individual are Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty (1859)Google Scholar; Green, T. H., Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (1895)Google Scholar; Laski, Harold J., Liberty in the Modern State, (1930)Google Scholar; Duguit, Léon, Souveraineté et liberté (1922)Google Scholar; Kallen, H. M. (ed.), Freedom in the Modern World (1928)Google Scholar; Smith, T. V., The Democratic Way of Life (1925)Google Scholar; Maritain, Jacques, Freedom in the Modern World (1936)Google Scholar; Fosdick, Dorothy, What is Liberty? (1939)Google Scholar; Merriam, Charles E., The New Democracy and the New Despotism (1939).Google Scholar

11 See Merriam, , On the Agenda of Democracy (1941)Google Scholar, Chap. 5, on new bills of rights.

12 See discussion of “The Poverty of Power” in my Political Power. “Embedded in the poverty of power lies much of the liberty of the world, safe from the hand of the aggressor who would take it away. Rights may be defended by ideologies, by patterns of concrete interests, by institutional contrivances and procedures designed to hold back the arbitrary, but liberty is still more deeply intrenched. Naked hands and empty pockets may obstruct and antagonize the action of authority and with means which can scarcely be successfully opposed without destroying the basis of human association itself. These forms of resistance are understood almost as well by the ignorant as by the learned—indeed, sometimes more perfectly—and their action may be spontaneous, unorganized, unled in emergencies.”

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