Natural rights, social contract, democracy, republicanism and limited government

The goal of this video is to give an overview of some terms that you will see as we study government. They come out of political philosophy either from the Enlightenment or even well before the Enlightenment. Some of them, these ideas are referred to in scripture or from the classical Greeks.

So, let's say we have a little community of human beings right over here, and we talk about this in our social contract video. So this right over here is our community, and so the first idea is maybe all individuals are endowed with some type of what we could call natural rights. That just by being a human being, you should have these rights.

Once again, these go back to the Enlightenment or, well before the Enlightenment, even to something like scripture. Some notions of natural rights might be, well, the right to your life, the right to liberty, the right to the pursuit of happiness. Those should sound very familiar, and we're going to study these ideas more in future videos.

The right to have your own personal property. Now, in the social contract video, we talked, well, in theory, if you don't have any type of overarching enforcement body or some type of code of conduct, some people might also say, well, I'm going to give myself some other rights. Maybe the right to seek revenge, maybe the right to imprison folks. Revenge, I could say, also to punish if I think someone has wronged me or if I even don't like them, like revenge or punishment.

The right to take property. We clearly see a conflict here because these things that I'm writing in this pink color, if I assume to have these rights, that would allow me to infringe on other people's natural rights. So the idea behind the social contract is, well, what if we as a society decide to give up these rights as individuals and we give them to something we call a government?

So, we'll give these rights to a government, and in exchange, the government should protect my other rights, not only these natural rights but maybe I have other rights that I will expect my government to protect. That notion is what we talk about in the social contract video as well; a social contract, which is a nice term to know.

We're giving up rights to the government in exchange for the government doing things for us. But that still leaves a very big question: what type of government do we have? Even in that social contract video, people said, well, maybe we don't need a full government; maybe just all of us can agree not to do these things to each other. If someone does, we can come up with some policies of what would be the punishment, etc., etc.

Then maybe we could get some people to enforce it just to make sure that people know it's going to happen. Well, even in that very primitive state, you are starting to create some form of a government. Now, if we think about larger communities of people, the predominant form of government that we've seen throughout most of human history has been a monarchy, where you have some type of a king or a queen or an emperor who rules over a country, who rules over a nation, who rules over a state.

Now, with the birth of the United States, you start having a major country with an alternate form of government, and that's a notion of a democracy. Democracy, which you can imagine, is another important term to know, and this comes from the classical Greeks during the Golden Age of Athens. You have what was first referred to as a democracy that was just a city-state.

With the United States, you start having a democracy for a fairly large country. Even when it was formed at the time, obviously, the United States is now much larger, and the core idea behind a democracy is that you don't have a monarch who rules, who is the sovereign. You have the people who rule; the people are the sovereign.

So this is another term that you will see: you have popular sovereignty. Sovereignty, that's a fancy word, but sovereign is just what rules over it. You see the term right over here, to reign; what rules over things? Here, you have the people ruling, and that's what's happening here in a democracy.

So here, the people are ruling. Now, in either case of a monarchy or a democracy, you have to ask the question of, well, regardless of who's ruling, can they just rule on anything arbitrarily? If all of these people decide to vote on taking maybe someone else's rights, maybe this person's rights right over here, is that okay? Or if this monarch wants to take this person's rights, is that okay?

Because of that fear that either with a monarchy or even with a democracy, in a democracy, you might have the majority rule to do something to a minority that is not so good, that starts to infringe on their natural rights. In order to avoid that, you have this notion of limited government. Limited government, which is this idea that regardless of who's ruling, whether it's a monarch or the people, you need to put some laws in place.

Maybe put a constitution in place that very explicitly states, well, what are the powers of the government? What rights does the government have? And what rights do the people have? So you could implement a constitution, and you can actually do it in either case—the constitution and laws of which the constitution helps set up.

If you're talking about a monarchy that is limited by a constitution, so if you have a king or queen, even they can't just rule anything—that's often known as a constitutional monarchy. But when you have a democracy that is constrained, that has limited government by these laws that are protecting the rights of people, we refer to this as a republic or republicanism.

So this is another good word: republicanism. This limited government and republicanism are often strongly associated with each other, and that's why the United States today, and many countries that have actually, in fact, modeled themselves after the United States, refer to themselves as democratic republics.

So, with just these terms, you have been well armed to better study not just the U.S. government but governments in general. In future videos, we will see how some of the founding documents of the United States, like the Declaration of Independence, like the United States Constitution, really embody these ideas.