4 ms·

Maybe 13th century England was not supposed to be a government of the people, but arguably all governments claim and have always claimed to be for the people.

• deciplex 11y ago
  Eh, I'm not so sure about that. We don't really have many even nominal principalities these days, so it's hard to imagine a state where both the people and the government are expected to serve the sovereign as a matter of course. But republicanism is more the outlier, historically, even if it enjoys a lot of contemporary success (whether in practice or in theory, is a matter of some debate, but nonetheless...).
• lazaroclapp 11y ago
  Not really. Kings and emperors might have had a moral duty towards the people, but that is hardly equivalent to them "serving" the people or governing "for" the people. Then there are colonies like the Belgian Congo and some Spanish possessions in the Americas, which were very explicitly run for the benefit of the respective European crown, not their inhabitants. Theocracies have generally been about pleasing God, not the people, with the underlying assumption that God's plan is definitionally the best for the people and that the priest class has unquestionable knowledge of such plan. There are probably even more examples. Governments explicitly "on behalf of the people" are more or less an historical rarity, even if all governments have needed to keep people below the successful armed revolt threshold as a practical matter.