This MedLibrary.org supplementary page on Consent of the governed is provided directly from the open source Wikipedia as a service to our readers. Please see the note below on authorship of this content, as well as the Wikipedia usage guidelines. To search for other content from our encyclopedia supplement, please use the form below:
Related Sponsors
 |
It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Popular sovereignty. () |
| The Politics series |
|---|
| Subseries of Politics |
| Politics Portal |
"Consent of the governed" is a political theory stating that a government's legitimacy and moral right to use state power are, or ought to be, derived from the people or society over which that power is exercised. This theory of "consent" is historically contrasted to the divine right of kings and has often been invoked against the legitimacy of colonialism. A key question is whether the unanimous consent of the governed is required; if so, this would imply the right of secession for those who do not want to be governed by a particular collective. The issue of unananimity forms the basis of the plotline of The Probability Broach.
In the United States
Using thinking similar to that of English political scientist John Locke, the founders of the United States believed in a state built upon the consent of "free and equal" citizens; a state otherwise conceived would lack the legitimacy and the authority to exercise legal authority. This was expressed, among other places, in the Virginia Bill of Rights, especially Section 6, quoted below.
"6. That elections of members to serve as representatives of the people, in assembly, ought to be free; and that all men, having sufficient evidence of permanent common interest with, the attachment to, the community, have the right of suffrage, and cannot be taxed or deprived of their property for publick uses without their own consent, or that of their representatives so elected, nor bound by any law to which they have not, in like manner, assented, for the public good."
References
- Etienne de La Boétie, Discourse of Voluntary Servitude
- Pettit, Philip, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997 (in which he argues, against a theory of the consent of the governed, in favour of a theory of the lack of explicit rebellion; following a Popperian view on falsifiability, Pettit considers that as consent of the governed is always implicitly supposed, thus trapping the social contract in a vicious circle, it should be replaced by the lack of explicit rebellion.
- David Hume, Of the Original Contract
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right (1762)
- H.B. Paksoy, IDENTITIES: How Governed, Who Pays?
Further Reading
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 15 August 2008, at 00:11.
Wikipedia Authorship and Review
Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.
Wikipedia Usage Guidelines
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Consent of the governed".
The URL for this specific entry is:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.