- [Instructor] The goal of this video
is to give an overview of some terms
that you will see as we study government
and they come out of political philosophy,
either from the Enlightenment
or even well before the Enlightenment.
Some of these ideas are referred to in scripture
or from the classical Greeks.
So, let's say we have a little community
of human beings right over here
and we talk about this in our social contract video,
so this right over here is our community
and so, the first idea is maybe all individuals
are endowed with some type
of what we could call natural rights,
that just by being a human being,
you should have these rights
and once again, these go back to the Enlightenment
or well before the Enlightenment,
even to something like scripture
and some notions of natural rights
might be the right to your life,
the right to liberty,
the right to the pursuit of happiness.
Those should sound very familiar
and we're going to study these ideas more
in future videos.
The right to have your own personal property.
Well, in theory, if you don't have any type
of overarching enforcement body
or some type of code of conduct,
some people might also say well,
I'm gonna give myself some other rights,
maybe the right to seek revenge,
maybe the right to imprison folks,
revenge, I could say also to punish,
if I think someone has wronged me
or if I even don't like them,
I could revenge or punishment.
The right to take property
and we clearly see a conflict here
because these things that I'm writing in this pink color,
if I assume to have these rights,
that would allow me to infringe
on other people's natural rights
and so, the idea behind social contract
is well, what if we as a society
we decide to give up these rights
as an individual
and we give them to something we call a government,
so we'll give these rights
to a government
and in exchange, the government should protect
my other rights,
not only these natural rights
but maybe I have other rights
that I will expect my government to protect
and that notion is what we talked about
in the social contract video
as well, the social contract
which is a nice term to know.
We're giving up rights to the government
in exchange for the government doing things for us
but that still leaves a very big question.
What type of government do we have?
Even in that social contract video,
people said well, maybe we don't need
a full government,
maybe just all of us can agree
not to do these things to each other
and if someone does,
we can come up with some policies
of what would be the punishment etc. etc.
And then maybe we could get some people
to enforce it just to make sure
that people know it's going to happen.
Well, even in that very primitive state,
you are starting to create some form of a government.
Now, if we think about larger communities of people,
the predominant form of government
that we've seen throughout most of human history
has been a monarchy
where you have some type of a king
or a queen or an emperor who rules over a country,
who rules over a nation,
who rules over a state.
Now, with the birth of the United States,
you start having a major country
with an alternate form of government
and that's a notion of a democracy
which you can imagine is another important term to know
and this comes from the classical Greeks.
During the golden age of Athens,
you have what was first referred to as a democracy.
That was just a city state.
With the United States you start having
a democracy for a fairly large country
even when it was formed at the time,
obviously the United States is now much larger
and the core idea behind a democracy
is that you don't have a monarch who rules
who is the sovereign,
you have the people who rule,
the people are the sovereign
and so, this is another term that you will see.
You have popular sovereignty.
It's a fancy word but sovereign is just well,
what rules over it?
You see the term right over here to reign.
What rules over things?
And here you have the people are ruling
and that's what's happening here in a democracy,
so here the people are ruling.
Now, in either case of a monarchy or a democracy
you have to ask the question
of well, regardless of who's ruling,
can they just rule on anything arbitrarily?
If all of these people decide to vote
on taking maybe someone else's rights,
maybe this person's rights right over here,
is that okay?
Or if this monarch wants to take this person's rights,
is that okay?
And so, because of that fear
that either with a monarchy or even with a democracy,
the democracy you might have the majority to rule
to do something to a minority
that is not so good,
that starts to infringe on their natural rights,
in order to avoid that
you have this notion of limited government
which is this idea that regardless of who's ruling
whether it's a monarch or the people,
you need to put some laws in place,
maybe put a constitution in place
that very explicitly states
well, what are the powers of the government,
what rights does the government have
and what rights do the people have?
And so, you could implement a constitution
and you can actually do it in either case.
Constitution and laws
of which the constitution helps set up
and if you're talking about a monarchy
that is limited by a constitution,
so if you have a king or a queen
but even they can't just rule anything,
that's often known as a constitutional monarchy
but when you have a democracy that is constrained
that has limited government by these laws
that is protecting the rights of people,
we refer to this as a republic or republicanism.
So, this is another good word, republicanism.
This is the limited government and republicanism
are often strongly associated with each other
and that's why the United States today
and many countries that have actually
in fact modeled themselves
after the United States
refer to themselves as democratic republics.
And so, with just these terms,
you have been well armed
to better study not just the US government
but governments in general
and in future videos we will see
how some of the founding documents of the United States
like the Declaration of Independence,
like the United States Constitution
really embody these ideas.