Consent of the governed

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"Consent of the governed" is a political theory stating that a government's legitimacy and moral right to use state power is, 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.

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 publick good."^[1]

References

• John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, chapter 8 section 95 (1690)
• Etienne de La Boétie, Discourse of Voluntary Servitude
• David Hume, Of the Original Contract
• Philip Pettit, 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.
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right (1762)

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References