The Ideal Form Of Government During The

The Ideal Form Of Government During The Enlightenm Essay, Research Paper Many of Earth’s organisms and processes depend on each other to survive the natural world. Plants get nutrients from the soil, small animals eat the plants, big animals consume the small animals, and the big animals die to return nutrients to the soil. This was a natural cycle that had been operating for as long as life occurred on Earth. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, also called the Age of Reason, philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, Baron de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet’s pen name) and John Locke employed the idea of natural dependency into their own unique ideas of ideal forms of government. Based on their ideas, my ideal government combines

the idea of Voltaire’s enlightened monarchy with Locke’s idea of individual rights.Hobbes, an English philosopher, had the idea of the simplest form of government occurring most often in nature. He favored the idea of absolute monarchy. He thought that pleasure was the sole objective of human behaviors, and that human would reason things according to pleasure. This desire often leads to wars of chaos, violence and destruction. He also described human’s life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Due to human nature, peace and order within a society can only be maintained through the rule of an individual using force if necessary. Everyone had to make a contract with an individual to give up his or her freedom and obey the individual. In return, the individual

ensured peace and order to the people, while no one would be able to rebel against the ruler. To my opinion, Hobbes’ ideas didn’t really make any sense. In his ideal society, growth of the society would be very limited, because the ruler made all decisions depending on his or her desires. When people noticed that what they were doing won’t benefit them in any way, they wouldn’t be striving for excellence as in people normally would be when they were getting paid for doing a job in our society.Montesquieu focused more on the idea of equality. He believed that the ideal government would be one like England’s Parliament divided into three branches of legislature, which made the laws, executive (the king), which enforced the laws, and judiciary (the courts), which

interpreted the laws. This acted like a three-way scale, balancing the power between the three branches. He thought that a government must be equal in power in order to be able to judge things equally, just like a three-way scale wouldn’t work if one was heavier than the other two. Montesquieu’s ideas about checks and balances in government later influenced the people who wrote the Constitution of many countries. However, the efficiency of this kind of government would be greatly reduced, since a series of complicated processes must be carried out through the three branches before anything can be judged.Similar to Montesquieu, Rousseau believed in the idea of equality and freedom. He thought that human were basically good, and that the society polluted the human minds. He

admired the “noble savage,” people who lived in a natural state, away from influences of civilization. He believed that the society should return to this natural state, but realized that it was impossible. Using this idea as a basis, he derived his idea of best society, where people in the society interacted with each other instead of a government ruling over them by making a social contract. Unlike many philosophers of the time, he thought that people should form a community where everyone would vote on all decisions and everyone must agree on the general will. His beliefs in democracy later influenced many revolutionaries in different countries. Although his idea seemed to be very idealistic, yet it would only be a dream. An advanced society must make hundreds of decisions