Consent of the Governed

Here in the US, we often take things for granted. One of those things is a relatively stable government where we get to decide (by majority) what rules we want enforced.

This idea—that a government is only legitimate if the people being governed actually want it—hasn’t always been so openly discussed. In fact, until fairly recently in the history of civilizations and governments, it has been incredibly taboo to discuss the very idea that people should have a say in how things are run.

There were very early hints at this development, going all the way back to the Code of Hammurabi. Here, the rights of the individual were written down and codified, and something like human rights were introduced. Even before Hammurabi’s laws, the rule of law existed, but his code is significant for a number of reasons.

Although Hammurabi’s code was harsh, it did set some limits on the king’s power, although we can only speculate as to whether he was truly bound by his own laws. Still, Hammurabi liked to portray himself as a fair and good ruler, so political and power considerations may have kept his lesser demons at bay. You can think of Hammurabi’s code as a bit of a PR tool that probably worked best when Hammurabi himself followed the rules.

It also offered some very basic protections. Property ownership was prominent among the rights mentioned, which makes a great deal of sense to me: people were crowded into fast-growing cities, and theft of property would create utter chaos. Similarly, a Babylonian citizen could get some harsh justice for damaged property or an assault, and this provided some stability.

Ultimately, the Code of Hammurabi did offer some predictability and a degree of security, but only as compared to a completely lawless state, where the king could just take stuff from you at any point. A tiny bit of accountability for the rich and powerful is better than no accountability at all, and so Hammurabi’s code is an important first milestone for us.

Athens is our next stop, where a lucky few got to vote on how things were run. If you were among the 10-20% of Athenians who were free, adult, and male, you could vote on the way just about everything was done. For certain decisions that were too tedious for everyone to vote on them, there were also representatives randomly chosen, lottery-style, from the citizens.

Rome took this representative form of government even further, forming a Republic that lasted five centuries. The republic was complex, and it wasn’t all about “power to the people.” Class struggles defined the Republic from the beginning, with Senators coming entirely from the upper patrician class at first (being friends with the king probably helped). They also had consuls that were sort of like two co-heads of state, and the Republic made it so that one of the two consuls was from the plebeian (poorer) class.

The Magna Carta in England came to be because rich nobles realized that the king needed them in order to wage war against any enemy, so they decided to leverage this power and get something in writing. In 1215, they signed a document that was the first of its sort in world history, where the ruling monarch wrote down some specific limitations on their power, suggesting that not even a king should be above the law.

It was the Roman republic and the Magna Carta that had the strongest influence on the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence clearly states:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

It was this single line from the Declaration that plainly stated one of the main ideas of the Enlightenment, and it was this document that really threw down the gauntlet with this new idea. The French Revolution followed soon, followed by a revolution in Haiti just two years later.

Consent of the governed contrasts heavily with the idea of the divine right of kings, one of those previous paradigms that most empires throughout history have followed. It also notably breaks away from colonialism, something the great powers had a hard time giving up, to say the least.

Today, the debate is far from settled in terms of which form of government is legitimate. Authoritarianism and democracies have roughly the same number of participants worldwide, and it’s not at all clear that a higher form of representation is likely this century.

The debate over whether some measure of authoritarian rule is necessary, especially among larger nations, is going to continue. It’s going to be fought on battlefields like Ukraine, but also in the digital realm with cyber warfare and propaganda campaigns becoming increasingly common, and like the Cold War of the 20th century, it will very likely also be an economic contest to see which system works better.

Personally, I like the idea of choosing how we’ll be governed, and I really don’t want to take that for granted. I think the extra work that goes into being an informed citizen is well made up for by what you get in return: the freedom to say how things are run, to have a voice in what direction the world goes next.

The form of government that requires the most of its citizens is, paradoxically, the one that gives us the most say in how things are run. We need to educate ourselves, and we need to show up to vote. Staying informed and not being misled by misinformation is like having a second job, and it’s the price we all pay for having a government that requires our consent.

It’s up to us to do the work to keep these systems running. I think it’s worth the trade off.