Many conspiracy theories talk about the government pulling the wool over our eyes, from Covid-fuelled anti-vaxxers to the gold-standard-obsessed fiat currency conspiracists. Browse such circles long enough and you can find people who believe that government itself is intrinsically “them” and has been from the start:
Government was the hand of the enemy in the very beginning and it has been since.
Most prominently, Sovereign Citizens and Freemen on the Land often believe this to be the case: as far as some of them are concerned, “government is slavery and inherently immoral”, and according to the government they imagine, you only exist as an asset or debt collateral. There are even those who link the modern government and financial systems to the ancient slave-trading codes of Babylon, with those ancient practices being used to oppress us today:
A new union between Babylonian religions, Babylonian banking and Babylonian law is returning the world to serfdom.
While I’m guessing few of those reading this will share these precise concerns, let’s be honest, we’ve all felt frustrated by the Powers That Be from time to time. The infuriating 40mph limit on that stretch of open road before the main bypass. The various and manifold taxes we have to pay, including bizarre-seeming rules, such as VAT on gingerbread if they have iced buttons as well as eyes. The feeling of watching the rich get richer while everyday folk struggle.
So what does the evidence say about the origin of government? Was it always there to keep the little guy down, paying unfair taxes to wealthy people who would prevent us regular folk from dancing drunk and naked through the streets on the weekend?
There is in fact an active debate (and has been a debate going back centuries, if not millennia) as to the origin of government in academic circles. There are usually said to be four main theories – divine right, social contract, force theory, and evolutionary theory – that split across two main frameworks: extractive and cooperative.
The extractive theories involve powerful people getting together, positioning themselves as the governing elite, oppressing the weak, and taking most of their stuff, thus ensuring they get to remain the governing elites. If governments did begin as gangs extracting wealth from everyone else, then the conspiracy theories like the above – while undoubtedly wrong in detail – would at least have a wider point.
Cooperative frameworks, on the other hand, suggest that people got together to solve problems and collaborate to achieve things that weren’t possible alone, with the government emerging in order to coordinate these activities.
The divine right theory is fairly self-explanatory – the idea that God or gods ordained certain people to run the show. Christians, for example, may turn to Romans 13:1:
Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.
While there’s no good evidence that any heavenly powers did in fact create earthly governments, monarchs have of course tried to claim their deity of choice ordained their rule. The most prominent Christian advocates of the divine right of kings came in the form of James I and the Stuarts in England, and Louis XIV of France, though subsequent events didn’t work out well for either dynasty.
It is interesting to note that, despite later Christian theological developments, one of the two biblical accounts of human origins (Adam and Eve) is notable for featuring all humans descending from two people, with no separate divine mandate for rulers, whereas other origin myths from West Asia and North Africa – from the Sumerian King List to the divine Pharaohs of Egypt – featured a separate class of rulers descended from heaven. A somewhat different version, the Mandate of Heaven, emerged in China, though most English-language scholarship has focused on Mediterranean and West Asian civilisations.
Still, divine right only really justifies and rationalises existing government structures; it doesn’t really explain how the governments arose in the first place. Similarly, the cooperative framework of the Social Contract provides a philosophical justification of governmental authority, but also seems to say little about how government originated. This idea, which came to prominence in the Age of Enlightenment, was espoused in various forms by thinkers from John Locke to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with a core claim by Thomas Hobbes that can be summarised as:
humans are driven by self-interest and live in a state of nature characterized by perpetual conflict. In order to escape the chaos and ensure their security, individuals voluntarily surrender their rights to a sovereign ruler who maintains order and enforces the law.
While this is an appealing framework, nobody seriously claimed that early governments were formed by people explicitly giving such consent. But what about an unspoken agreement? As eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume said:
Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artizan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires? …We may as well assert, that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean, and perish, the moment he leaves her.
It isn’t even a tacit agreement to be governed if the consequences of opting out are catastrophic. This feels a lot like force theory! Is Hume – a philosopher well-regarded by many skeptics – agreeing with the conspiracists’ wider point, here?
Almost all the governments which exist at present, or of which there remains any record in story, have been founded originally either on usurpation or conquest or both, without any pretense of a fair consent or voluntary subjection of the people.
However, Hume is referring to governments in existence at his time of writing, or for which there are records. He makes no claims as to knowing the origin of governments before his time, or for which he had no records (or at least access to records); as a good skeptic, he didn’t like making claims without evidence. We are back to the drawing board on the actual origins.
By the 19th and early 20th centuries, you have theories leaning towards force and extraction, from Marxism, with ideas around the emergence of the state due to agriculture, private property and class struggle between property-owning and subordinate classes within a community, to the libertarianism of the likes of Franz Oppenheimer, who said:
the State grew from the subjection of one group of men by another. Its basic justification, its raison d’être, was and is the economic exploitation of those subjugated.
For Oppenheimer, ancient roving bands, who found it easier to kill and steal what others had, came to realise that they could instead enslave the population, and eventually institutionalise it with a governing class extracting tribute – which became taxes – and ruling over villages, then wider groups, with laws and so forth.
Given the events of the twentieth century, it is easy to see why such a perspective gained traction, with major works still published from this perspective, including Against the Grain (2017) by the late anarchist-leaning political scientist James C. Scott, advertised by its publisher as follows:
Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains, and governed by precursors of today’s states? Most people believe that plant and animal domestication allowed humans, finally, to settle down and form agricultural villages, towns, and states, which made possible civilization, law, public order, and a presumably secure way of living. But archaeological and historical evidence challenges this narrative. The first agrarian states, says James C. Scott, were born of accumulations of domestications: first fire, then plants, livestock, subjects of the state, captives, and finally women in the patriarchal family — all of which can be viewed as a way of gaining control over reproduction.
He’s essentially arguing for an extractive origin of government, with early governments in Mesopotamia, around 5,000 years ago, having to force populations to live in states.
However, there are serious issues with this stance. Göbekli Tepi (for example) was around some thousands of years before this; humans had been messing around with settled communities of one type or another for some time. Evidence suggests people were processing cereals in Göbleki Tepi to supplement a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and worked together, with significant shared labour needed to quarry and construct the megalithic structures found at the site.
Can we be sure that these people formed such societies as a matter of cooperation – whether for food, trade, safety, security, or religious reasons – rather than being forced to do so? Recent archaeological evidence in fact suggests that maybe we can. Leander Heldring led an academic team that looked at The Economic Origins of Government. Focusing also on the heavily-studied area of Mesopotamia, they used existing data to map the area, with the assumption that evidence of ancient local government would follow resources – in this case water – if it was primarily for extractive purposes, while:
if it’s actually about trying to cooperate with one another, and building organizations to facilitate that, then you’d expect to see states form in the resource-poorer places where people have to get along in order to stay put.
The team found three strands of evidence for cooperation: states appeared when the waterways moved or dried up and resources became scarce; public collaborative works – canals – emerged to benefit communities rather than steal resources; and written records showed communities traded goods and some degree of autonomy in return for the benefit of services like canals.
Heldring believes that coercive and extractive government followed, but it seems like there is at least some evidence after all for the social contract theory, alongside the final option, Evolutionary Theory, which “suggests that government evolved gradually over time, as societies grew larger and more complex.”
Still, despite what conspiracy theorists – and sadly some political groups – seem to espouse, it’s worth remembering that there’s evidence that at least some of the first governments formed not to oppress the weak, but to save each other from catastrophe and manage tasks not possible alone. It’s a lesson worth remembering in 2026, whether the crisis is the shifting course of a river, a pandemic, or a global climate emergency.
