Human society is different from other animal societies because of humanity’s most important idea: legitimate government.

Before the beginnings of the Enlightenment, a period where Western Civilisation synthesised ideas about God, reason, nature, and humanity that went on to revolutionise politics, arts, and philosophy, Thomas Hobbes’ famous tome, Leviathan, set out the foundations for social contract theory under which legitimate government is derived.

Hobbes argued that without a strong state, there was a war of all against all. This war led to neither prosperity nor community, but to uncertainty.

In effect, if humans give up some of their rights to a ruling power, as in a social contract between the government and the governed, they exchange these rights for the protection of their lives and property through the exercise of reason and impartial application of the law. In this way, humans and their ability to reason can overcome the anarchical tendency of an animal society and live in relative peace and security.

Of course, establishing a legitimate government requires limits to government power so as not to curtail the rights of individuals arbitrarily or for some corrupt purpose. In his Second Treatise of Government, John Locke expanded on the idea of legitimate government that exercises political power as:

…a right of making laws with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties, for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community, in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the common-wealth from foreign injury; and all this only for the public good.

Civil society, as opposed to humans living in a state of nature, enables reason to be used impartially in pursuit of the public good ‘even where this may conflict with the rights of individuals’.

Power must not be exercised arbitrarily, it must only be used to retribute a criminal in proportion to the transgression.

In these early stages of modern liberal democracy, we see the development of government not as an absolute power that uses violence to force its subjects to submit, but a general agreement between citizens and the government. Hobbes brings in government to establish a civil society, and Locke then places limits upon the role of government to protect the rights of individuals.

Later, Montesquieu brought in the idea of the separation of powers, a doctrine in Australia that separates, in its Westminster sense at least, the powers of the executive arm of government (that administers the laws and includes the Cabinet, the public service, and the police and military forces), the legislature or Parliament which makes the laws, and the judiciary or the courts which interpret the laws. This separation protects individuals from arbitrary government decisions and provides checks and balances to protect individuals from the government.

Later still, John Stuart Mill in On Liberty set out the rights of individuals in relation to the government but also the market of ideas that is facilitated by freedom of speech and the eccentricities that enable variation in human behaviours. Ultimately, Mill argued that allowing stupid ideas to be aired enabled these ideas to be seen as stupid through the application of reason. To prevent people from airing their ideas would simply force them underground to fester where their unchecked eruption could result in the type of liberty that brought about France’s Reign of Terror beginning around 1792.

Mill’s ideas were revolutionary in the 19th Century, but to the modern reader, On Liberty reflects the type of liberal education that most people born in the last century would regard as normal.

Ideas about human society did not end with Mill and what we might refer to as classical liberalism, in its ideological sense, today.

The excesses of the Industrial Revolution, most notably in the match factories where predominantly women who were exposed to phosphorus, added to enable ‘strike anywhere’ matches, suffered from an industrial disease known as ‘phossy jaw’. Phossy jaw began with abscesses in the mouth, facial disfigurement, and death by brain damage. The emergence of socialism and trade unions brought about a raft of workplace reforms we often take for granted today.

But there is an underside to socialism that is much more insidious than the government intervention promoted by the Fabian Society, the founders of the London School of Economics, and their gradual reformist faith in social democracy.

Labor governments in Australia arose from the union movement and the Fabian tradition, but there has always been tension between the reformers and the radicals of the left. The reformers see government as a means of putting a human face on capitalism, whereas the radicals, or more appropriately, the communists, see government as the very problem with human society.

From Hobbes and his conservatism that saves us from anarchy to Locke and Mill and their liberalism, and to the Fabians and their reformist zeal, communism brings us full circle back to anarchy.

That’s where Albanese’s Labor Party is taking us. They’re not building anything. They’re tearing us apart.

Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is the Spectator Australia’s Canberra Press Gallery Correspondent. If you would like to support his writing, or read more of Michael, please visit his website.