The Government and the State: Two Ways of Thinking

Abstract

The opposition between the State and the Government is traditionally considered as one of the principal problems of the Modern Political Philosophy. The Government in this pair usually means the natural Institution that grows from the nature self of the human society, which requires an administration. The classical example of such nations which have a Government instead of the State, according to the author, is the United States and Great Britain. In the first case, the real Sovereign is the People, in the second — the Crown. In compliance with it, the State is the artificial organism, which appeared for the first time in Europe in the middle of XVII century. The author analyses the Government and the State as two diverse modes of thinking the Political things. He deduces the Government’s logic from the Roman civitas, while the State’s logic, according to him, is the heir of the Greek polis, as Aristotle described it. The author emphasises that the Government usually practices the natural religion, whereas the State creates its own, political one. In its higher form, such religion has only one superior god, and this is the State itself (Thomas Hobbes defined the State as a “mortal god”).