The government as a necessary evil

Government as a necessary evil is Thomas Paine’s distinction between society, which grows from human needs and affections, and political authority, which becomes necessary to restrain human misconduct. Government is not the source of social life or an end in itself: it is a constrained remedy for failures of virtue, legitimate only insofar as it secures freedom and safety. This account begins in a hypothetical community formed without government and ends with a test of political authority: whether it continues to protect the people, or instead becomes a source of the insecurity it was created to prevent.

Society Before Government

Paine rejects the idea that society and government are interchangeable. Society is produced by people’s wants; it unites affections and encourages interaction. Government has a different origin and function: it restrains vice and punishes wrongdoing. One draws people together; the other establishes distinctions and imposes restraint. Society, in this account, is an intrinsic good, while government is an instrument required by human imperfection.

The distinction also shapes Paine’s contrasting descriptions of each. Society in every condition is a blessing. Government, even at its best, is a necessary evil; at its worst, it becomes intolerable. When people suffer under a government from miseries they might have faced without one, their calamity is compounded by the knowledge that they have supplied the means of their own suffering. Political authority is thus especially blameworthy when it fails at the task that justifies its existence.

Paine likens government to dress, a badge of lost innocence, and says that kings’ palaces stand on the ruins of paradise’s bowers. The imagery casts political rule not as humanity’s original condition but as evidence of a departure from it. If conscience were clear, uniform, and invariably obeyed, people would need no other lawgiver. Since it is not, they prudently surrender part of their property to protect what remains. Government is warranted by the need for security, but the surrender is a practical compromise between evils, not proof that authority is naturally sacred.

How Necessity Produces Political Authority

To explain government’s origin, Paine imagines a small group settling in an isolated part of the earth. In this state of natural liberty, society would come first. A single person’s strength could not meet all the demands of life, nor could anyone thrive in continual solitude. Four or five people together could build a tolerable dwelling in the wilderness; a solitary laborer might spend a lifetime felling timber and still be unable to move or erect it. Hunger and other needs would repeatedly draw him away from the work.

The imagined settlement makes mutual dependence concrete. Disease or misfortune could disable an isolated person and leave him unable to live, even if neither misfortune were itself fatal. Cooperation, by contrast, supplies assistance and relief. Necessity therefore draws the newcomers into society as surely as a force of gravity. While they remain just toward one another, reciprocal benefit can make law and government unnecessary.

That condition does not last automatically. As settlers overcome the first hardships that bound them together in a common cause, their duty and attachment to one another may weaken. Paine identifies this slackening—not society’s original formation—as the circumstance that makes government necessary. Political institutions supply a practical check where moral virtue fails to govern conduct reliably. Government is therefore secondary to society and contingent on a specific deficiency: it addresses the distance between the mutual obligations people can recognize and the virtue they can consistently practice.

Delegated Power and Public Security

Paine’s account of political beginnings does not make authority an unlimited power imposed from above. He imagines the settlers first assembling beneath a convenient tree that serves as a statehouse, where the whole colony can deliberate about public matters. Their first laws might be called regulations and enforced only through public disesteem. In this earliest parliament, every person would have a seat by natural right.

As the colony grows, distance and the expanding volume of public business make it inconvenient for everyone to assemble on every occasion. The community can then entrust legislative work to a select number chosen from the whole body, on the understanding that representatives share their constituents’ concerns and act as the community would if present. Further growth calls for more representatives and the division of the colony into parts, each sending its proper number, so that the interests of every part receive attention.

Representation remains legitimate only if the elected do not form an interest separate from the electors. Paine therefore presents frequent elections as a safeguard: representatives should return to the general community within months, rejoining the people whose trust they hold. Their expectation of returning to ordinary public life gives them reason not to make a rod for themselves. Frequent interchange, in turn, establishes common interests across the community, which supports both governmental strength and the governed people’s happiness. Authority is made answerable through recurring contact between those who exercise it and those who authorize it.

The imagined community also clarifies how public authority changes with circumstances. When the colony is small, direct participation is practicable; as population and public concerns increase, elected representation becomes convenient and ultimately necessary. Paine’s account thus treats government’s form as a response to the scale of collective life, while maintaining popular participation as its foundation. His later proposal for annual assemblies with a president only, and for domestic business subject to a Continental Congress, extends this preference for accountable representative arrangements rather than personal rule.

The Standard and Failure of Government

Paine states the governing standard directly: security is government’s true design and end. It follows that the preferred form is whichever can provide that security with the least expense and greatest benefit. Government’s necessity does not excuse any form of rule whatever; rather, it creates a test by which political arrangements can be judged. An authority that increases danger, undermines freedom, or burdens the people without protecting them defeats its own justification.

The standard also informs Paine’s criticism of the English constitution. He argues for simplicity in political design because simpler arrangements are less liable to disorder and easier to repair. A complicated constitution can leave a nation suffering for years without identifying where responsibility lies: competing explanations divide blame among different parts, and political advisers prescribe incompatible remedies. Even an absolute government has, in his comparison, the limited advantage of making the source of suffering and the apparent remedy easier to identify. That comparison does not make absolute rule desirable; it highlights the political cost of obscured accountability.

Paine’s attack on monarchy similarly turns on whether government serves public security or diverts authority toward private and dynastic power. He argues that royal influence over public appointments can swallow the power and erode the virtue of the House of Commons, the republican element he identifies within England’s constitution. In his account, monarchy poisons the representative part of the system; when republican virtue fails, slavery follows. The issue is not merely the name attached to a constitution, but whether the people retain meaningful power to choose representatives and hold rulers answerable.

A Test Applied to Revolutionary Crisis

The principle of government as a necessary evil carries into Paine’s argument about the American crisis. He warns that the continent’s common cause could be lost through delay and timidity, and that Britain’s distance and ignorance made it unable to govern the colonies justly. Petitioning and peaceful methods had failed, he argues, while the violence against people and property made defensive arms morally distinguishable from fighting merely to enforce a financial law. For Paine, when protection fails and government becomes an instrument of threatened harm, continued subjection no longer satisfies the purpose for which political authority exists.

His argument does not treat the transition away from British rule as a license for unbounded force. He links the justification for taking up arms to violence against people, destruction of property, and invasion of the country, rather than to taxation alone. He locates the political break in the moment defensive resistance became necessary, presenting independence as a consequence of events the colonies had not initiated. The standard of security therefore governs both the case for government and the limit of obedience to a government that no longer secures its people.

Paine also warns that a political vacuum carries its own dangers. He describes America as without law or established government, held together by a concurrence of sentiment that secret enemies might dissolve. In that unsettled condition, he argues for drawing a distinction between captured English soldiers and inhabitants of America who take up arms, because the former are prisoners while the latter, in his proposed political order, are traitors. Whatever the severity of that prescription, its place in the argument shows that Paine does not understand political freedom as the absence of all public rules. A community without an established legal framework risks leaving action and allegiance uncertain.

The remedy is not simply to replace one authority with another, but to build institutions capable of protecting the common interest. Paine proposes annual assemblies, a president only, more equal representation, and domestic affairs subject to a Continental Congress; elsewhere he outlines a representative Congress with rotating selection of its president. These proposals return to the same measure established in his account of government’s origin: public power must be formed to preserve freedom and security, tied to the people through representation, and guarded against becoming an independent interest of its own. Government remains a necessary evil, but its necessity is no blank cheque. Its authority endures only while it serves the human purposes that first made it necessary.