Jeremy Bentham, best known as the advocate of Utilitarianism, took a somewhat different approach to identifying the role of government. Bentham (1) stated that "by utility it is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness?or to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered: if that party is the community in general, than the happiness of the community." The concept of "community" was certainly understood by this philosopher to represent the "people' and/or the "state."
Bentham (1) saw the community as a "fictitious body, compiled of the individual persons who are considered as constituting it as it were its members. The interest of the community then is?the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it." These interests included safety and security, law and order, and early(a) mechanisms designed to both maximise the greatest amount of happiness for
These different thinkers present radically different views of government. For Burke, government exists as a mechanism created by the participation of the people and in service of their interests. For Bentham, the sole function of government is to maximize utility by maximizing the happiness and well-being enjoyed by the greatest number of citizens. Nietzsche saw the state as broadly functioning as a guarantor of slave religion and as a ancestor of repression for true aristocrats. Marx, on the other hand, saw government's ideal role as all-encompassing and as legitimized by the meaningful participation of the working classes - the only class of significance in an idealized society.
Marx, Karl. The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: W.W.
Norton,
by Nietzsche is slight about government per se than about society and the origins of morality. Nevertheless, it offers brainwave into how Nietzsche saw government.
Available at www.constitution.org/ed/rev_fran.htm.
Nietzsche (1), in a discussion of "good versus bad, good versus evil," made note of the item that "the role of political superiority always resolves itself into the idea of mental superiority, in those cases where the highest caste is at the same time the sacerdotal caste." From the perspective of this philosopher, the notion that mankind can be carve up into such groups as "aristocrats" and "slaves" suggests that there are basic inequities in spite of appearance most societies that government might need to address. On the genealogy of Morals
Available at www.constitution.org/jb/pml_01.htm.
From this statement we may sympathise certain ideas about government and its role. First, government is necessary on the nose because so many men are slaves" and not "aristocrats," with the originator incapable of governing themselves and the latter not needing an external source of control. Secondly, government seems to have the primary purpose of controlling those "supermen" who, permit alone, might come to dominate the
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