I recommend you take a look at John Locke, who's ideas were the foundation of the ideas forwarded by the founding fathers of America.
plato.stanford.edu
Why do people exert influence and power over other people? Essentially, we are born into a condition of animus of one unto another. That is just the way it is. Government is a one off from human sentiment, even a government by the (voting) people, when voting rights are denied a segment of the people, they are not represented and are bound to suffer for it. Another philosopher from the enlightenment period put it this way:
To this war of every man against every man, this also in consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Oxford at the Clarendon Press. 1651.
The challenge to each of us is to rise above that nature, which is aided by a government structured so that no individual has a right of power over another as a matter of birth, and all have a common responsibility to share in governance (of, by, and for ourselves). Obviously slavery and inequality of rights were bound to be flushed out as a violation of that premise. |
