Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness

The expression “Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness” distinguishes the human bond that grows from mutual need from the political apparatus required when people fail to sustain that bond through virtue alone. Its significance lies in making government conditional: society is a blessing, while government is a necessary restraint whose legitimacy depends on how well it secures the people.

Two Different Origins

Society and government, the argument insists, are not interchangeable. Human wants draw people together; their affections and cooperation make society a positive good. Government answers a different condition: it restrains vice, punishes wrongdoing, and introduces distinctions where social intercourse encourages connection. One is described as a patron, the other as a punisher.

The difference is illustrated through a hypothetical settlement in an isolated part of the earth. A person alone cannot readily meet ordinary needs: four or five people could raise a tolerable dwelling in a wilderness, while one person might fell timber but be unable to move or erect it. Hunger interrupts labor, separate wants pull in different directions, and illness or misfortune can leave an isolated person unable to live. Mutual assistance is therefore not first imposed by law; it is elicited by the conditions of human life.

From Cooperation to Government

In this imagined beginning, necessity draws emigrants together so powerfully that their reciprocal benefits can make law and government unnecessary, provided they remain just toward one another. Political authority enters only as the first common difficulties recede: people relax their duty and attachment to each other, and government must supply what declining moral virtue no longer reliably provides.

The first institutions are correspondingly modest. The settlers can meet beneath a convenient tree to deliberate on public matters; their earliest laws may be called regulations and enforced only by public disesteem. Each person has a natural right to a seat in this first assembly. As the colony grows, distance and expanding public business make universal attendance impractical, so the people may entrust legislation to selected representatives. Frequent elections are proposed to keep representatives from forming interests separate from those of their electors and to bring them back into the community. The account thus presents government not as society’s source but as an arrangement society creates when its scale and its failures make direct cooperation insufficient.

Government’s Limited Justification

The expression’s contrast leads to a severe judgment of political power. Society in every condition is called a blessing; government, even at its best, remains a necessary evil and, at its worst, an intolerable one. When people endure through government miseries they might have expected without it, their calamity is compounded by the knowledge that they themselves furnished the means of their suffering. Government is likened to dress, a badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings stand, in the accompanying image, on the ruins of paradise’s bowers.

The argument does not conclude that government can simply be dispensed with. If conscience were clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, no other lawgiver would be needed; because it is not, people prudently surrender part of their property to protect what remains. Security is therefore government’s true design and end. Any form that promises security with the least expense and greatest benefit is preferable, while authority that fails this purpose has no independent claim to allegiance merely because it exists.

Political Consequences

The distinction also grounds the claim that human beings were originally equal and that political rank requires scrutiny. Rich and poor may arise through subsequent circumstances, but the division between kings and subjects is presented as a greater distinction without a truly natural or religious justification. The argument’s suspicion of monarchy follows from its account of government: political institutions should answer to common needs and security, not turn power into inherited elevation.

The same standard is applied to England’s political arrangements. A king’s principal work is described as making war and distributing offices, actions that impoverish the nation and set people against one another. The crown’s control of appointments is said to have swallowed the power and weakened the virtue of the House of Commons. The contrast is not simply between named forms of government; it is between institutions that preserve public participation and those that redirect public power toward monarchy.

In the discussion of the colonies, dependence on Great Britain is judged by its effects rather than by inherited attachment. The argument calls the hoped-for benefits of reconciliation a dream that has passed, and maintains that colonial connection draws America into European wars and quarrels. It instead presents commerce as a basis for peaceful relations: America’s trade could make it a free port of interest to Europe, while political independence would avoid entanglement in conflicts for which the colonies have neither anger nor complaint.

The principle extends to the costs and institutions of independence. A debt incurred to secure a settled government and an independent constitution is treated as worthwhile if it completes that work; spending millions merely to repeal objectionable acts and remove a ministry would leave posterity both the unfinished task and a debt from which it gained no advantage. A national debt, if it bears no interest, can serve as a national bond. The argument further compares Britain’s debt of more than 140 million sterling and its interest burden of more than four million with the prospective cost of an American navy, and proposes that the value of western lands and their quit-rents could help discharge debt and later support government expenses. Across these examples, political and fiscal arrangements are assessed by whether they secure collective life without making the people bear costs for power exercised against their interests.