Who examined the relationship between government and people?

Answer 1

This is a question that is difficult to answer simply because of the number of explanations which have been offered by various individuals over the course of thousands of years of philosophy. In the West, one can argue the Classical Greek philosophers were the first to analyze this relationship, though they generally only approached the concept of the ideal government and what societal justice should comprise. In the East, philosophers such as Mozi, Laozi, Hanfeizi, and Confucius analyzed the relationship between the ruler and the populaces in terms which generally demanded the complete obedience of the populace to the government.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the Divine Right theory dominated both Western and Eastern theories of government. In the West, the general belief, persisting from the Early Middle Ages into the Enlightenment was that God bestowed Kings with the right to rule, and that any attempt to rebel against them was a rebellion not only against order and stability, but against God himself. In the East, the theory was more based off of traditional formulations and was arguably more flexible. According to Chinese philosophy up until the fall of the Manchurian Dynasty in the Xinhai Revolution, an ambiguous entity simply referred to as 'Heaven' bestowed rulers with the Mandate of Heaven, the mandate to rule. It was a flexible theory which embodied many ideals of responsible government in the sense that Heaven had a trend of withdrawing the mandate and granting it to another dynasty after the old government failed to operate properly in the interests of the country. It became established belief that the government had a responsibility to govern for the sake of the people.

In the period known as the Enlightenment, Western philosophers turned away from divine explanations of government and began hypothesizing in a rational sense. Thomas Hobbes and john Locke were two of the most famous philosophers of government who examined the mentioned relationship in detailed terms. The former argued people were, by nature, bad, and that the government had a duty to rule absolutely and maintain order. The latter argued that the people were the masters of their government and ought to be granted certain undeniable rights. Both agreed, however, that the government was an embodiment of the will of the people. Later philosophers' ideas of government were generally extensions of either of the two themes.