A government is "the organization, that is the governing authority of a political unit," "the ruling power in a political society," and the apparatus through which a governing body functions and exercises authority. "Government, with the authority to make laws, to adjudicate disputes, and to issue administrative decisions, and with a monopoly of authorized force where it fails to persuade, is an indispensable means, proximately, to the peace of communal life."Adler 80-81 "A compulsory territorial monopolist of protection and jurisdiction equipped with the power to tax without unanimous consent." Statist theorists maintain that the necessity of government derives from the fact that the people need to live in communities, yet personal autonomy must be constrained in these communities.

A state or province of sufficient size and complexity will have different layers or levels of government: local, regional and national.

Types of government

• Anarchy - Absence, or lack of government.
• Democracy - Rule by a government where the people as a whole hold the power. It may be exercised by them (direct democracy), or through representatives chosen by them (representative democracy).

• Despotism - Governing by a single individual, the despot, who wields all the power and authority of the state. Other persons are subsidiary to the despot.
• Dictatorship - Rule by an individual who has full power over the country. See also Autocracy and Stratocracy.
• Monarchy - Rule by an individual who has inherited the role and expects to bequeath it to their heir.
• Oligarchy - Rule by a small group of people who share similar interests or family relations.
• Plutocracy - A government composed of the wealthy class.
• Theocracy - Rule by a religious elite.
• Tyranny - Governing by a single ruler, the tyrant, holding vast, if not absolute power through a state.

Some countries have hybrid forms of Government such as modern Iran with its combination of democratic and theocratic institutions, and constitutional monarchies such as The Netherlands combine elements of monarchy and democracy.

Origin of government

For many thousands of years when people were hunter-gatherers and small scale farmers, humans lived in small, "relatively non-hierarchical" and mostly self-sufficient communities. However, the human ability to precisely communicate abstract, learned information allowed humans to become ever more effective at agriculture,Christian 146-147 and that allowed for ever increasing population densities.Christian 245 David Christian explains how this resulted in states with laws and governments: