The philosophical tradition in the West has developed the theoretical foundations of political authority and law since the time of Plato. The collective work of the central figures of this tradition clearly revealed the principles behind legitimate enforceable law. Today, these theoretical principles behind political authority have been significantly confirmed by the social sciences from the 20th century to the present. Political authority, we shall see, is legitimate to the extent that it promotes rationally grounded principles of justice and equality, socially grounded freedom, promotion of the common good of all, and true universality. These principles may be summed up in the notion of “sovereignty of the people.”

Yet both the present world system and the ideologies behind the bourgeois culture of many existing nation-states have distorted and obscured these foundations. In this short essay, I will attempt to identify the legitimate basis for political authority as it has been developed by the great thinkers of the Western tradition. The essay will conclude by showing in what ways all existing sovereign nations exist primarily as concentrations of inherently violent and illegitimate forms of authority. I will then show how truly legitimate political authority can be firmly established in today’s world and grounded in clear and rationally defensible principles through a global social contract.

Part One: The Foundations of Political Legitimacy

As early as the 4th century BCE, Plato understood that legitimate political authority required a society founded on rational principles. He lived during the great Axial Period in human history when humankind had developed the capacity to use reason to discern the universal principles of ethical and political life. The key issue to this day, in politics as well as ethics, has been whether the ends, goals, and principles of human life are grounded in desires and passions or whether they are grounded in reason. For Plato, reason could discern rational principles (such as justice) and contained the power to subordinate passions and desires within its service. Legitimate government should be premised on the rule and legitimate authority of reason within society.

Building on Plato’s great insight that the logos or reason in human beings could and should be patterned on the rational foundations of the cosmos, Aristotle also understood that reason could discern the principles of proper human development. He described the relationships between arête (excellence) and a properly developing rational potential with respect to emotions, desires, and reason itself. As for Plato, the state consisted of the various aspects of a human self ‘written large’. Legitimate laws not only reflect this rational development but encourage it in the population. For both Plato and Aristotle, legitimate law is what promotes human excellence, justice, and happiness (eudaimonia) in society.

The Stoics carried these insights into the nature and foundation of legitimate political authority to its logical conclusion in human universality. As rational animals, all human beings were microcosms of the macrocosm, all capable of living according to values discerned by reason and to embody this rationality in good laws. When Cicero declared “We are all servants of the law in order to be able to be free”, however, he was adding an additional depth to the insight that recognized the significance of distinguishing jus naturale, jus gentium, and jus civile [1]. The natural law of human reason (jus natural) is reflected widely in human societies everywhere on Earth (jus gentium). But for Cicero, it is precisely the social embodiments of natural law that make human beings free. Good law is the source of human freedom.

The great discourse of human freedom as a foundation for political legitimacy had entered the historical discussion. Plato had already defined freedom indirectly in Book IX of the Republic. The just person is happier because he has mastered his passions and can live freely under the rulership of reason, also because he or she finds true pleasures in the life of reason, and because a life informed by the truth is nobler and freer than one lost in illusions. Freedom consists in living according to reason and not as a slave of the passions; it is the same both in society and in persons.

During the Medieval renaissance of the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas again discerned that a properly developed human reason resulted in certain natural virtues and that the foundations of a just and legitimate society lay in laws and practices that encouraged and embodied these virtues. He went beyond Aristotle and the Stoics, however, in recognizing a dimension of “theological virtues” of faith, hope, and charity that developed beyond the natural virtues, embracing them with a cosmic participation and awareness transcending what the ancients had identified [2]. Society is and should be rooted in awareness of the cosmic depths that encompass our lives. That aspect of freedom that includes living with a meaningful depth of awareness was thus brought into our picture of the proper foundations for free and just societies.

During the 17th century there were several thinkers, such as Johannes Althusius and Duplessis Mornay, who recognized the inherently people-based aspect of the social contract, and the fact that political authority is rooted in the “covenant” arising from the people as a whole. It is the common good of the people as a whole that justifies and grounds legitimate government. For Althusius, the authority of the ruler is grounded in the right of the people. The political authorities must rule under God with “right reason” (the law of nature identified from Plato through Aquinas) and in the service of “the body of the commonwealth,” that is, for the common good of the people, who are ultimately sovereign [3].

Thomas Hobbes famously called the state of nature prior to people entering into civil society under government a “state of war.” For Hobbes the sole justification of the political authority was to keep order, to impose peace upon a collection of individuals who were greedy, egoistic, and violent [4]. In this vision of the justification for governmental authority freedom dies, for the government has all powers except that of taking the lives of citizens. The purpose is not freedom but order. The idea of a common good that creates the conditions for human development and freedom and rooted in the collective social life of human beings is here denied. Hobbes uses some of the language of natural law theory but eviscerates it of any substantive content.

Baruch Spinoza opposed this vision of Hobbes with the insight that society is based upon the collective will to protect the freedom of its members and to provide the conditions for the development of intellect or reason concomitant with mitigation of slavery to the passions (which is the opposite of freedom). Cicero’s insight is again brought to the fore. Like Althusius, Spinoza recognized that human beings are not isolated Hobbesean atoms struggling with one another in external relationships of greed and ego conflict. Rather, we are undamentally social beings bound together through internal relationships and our common rational nature [5]. Legitimate societies are grounded in this insight that society as a whole is the matrix and foundation of freedom and the justification of all political authority is precisely this socially grounded freedom. Natural law, properly understood, need not be in conflict with the notion of a social grounded freedom.

In the 18th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau carried this insight to the conclusion that the social contract (that is the framework of society as a whole under legitimate government) is the source and foundation of all human freedoms. You cannot coherently posit a fixed “human nature” prior to government and civil society (as John Locke, for example, attempted to do) for it is the social matrix that makes us precisely what we are and provides both the framework and the possibility of developing our potential for freedom, ethical maturity, and the dignity of citizenship. The social contract establishes a moral reality known as the “general will,” a common good that encompasses and empowers all its members [6].

Immanuel Kant, inspired by Rousseau, articulated the insight that living under a government that guaranteed ‘freedom, equality, and independence” for all citizens was a universal moral duty. The socialpolitical reality of an effective republican constitution both established our freedoms and provided “an absolute end in all social relationships,” i.e. the moral duty to live under such republican forms of government and to participate as citizens in the evolution of these societies toward ever-greater freedom and mutual recognition of human dignity [7].

The ideal inherent in our universalizing rational will (the categorical imperative) is “the kingdom of ends,” that is, a “union of all rational beings” who treat one another as ends in themselves (that is morally) [8]. Political legitimacy is therefore rooted in the imperative to protect human freedom and dignity. Society becomes a morally grounded framework for establishing ever-greater freedom and corresponding ethical relationships. A free person, for Kant, is one acting on his or her rational will to do what is right, regardless of one’s inclinations. This is very different from the popular idea of freedom as license to do whatever one feels like doing. As with Plato, Spinoza and others before him, Kant repudiates illusory “savage and lawless freedom” in favor of genuine rational freedom [9].

In the 19th century, G.W.F. Hegel shifted the insight regarding freedom developed from Cicero to Kant into a comprehensive historical framework: the movement of human history has been the evolutionary development of freedom. It is not simply that there is a static natural law that grounds political authority. Rather, the movement of human thought in its dynamic historical development is the movement of freedom becoming ever more concrete within history. The transcendental freedom posited by Kant’s categorical imperative needs a concrete grounding within history and society.

With the exception of Hobbes, for none of these thinkers is freedom the license to do whatever one feels like doing. For none of these thinkers, with the exception of Hobbes, is freedom something possessed by individuals prior to the constitution of society. Spinoza had pointed out that freedom is self-determination that comes about through self-awareness and a process of negating what impedes or limits freedom. The legitimate authority of society is founded on its function of protecting individuals and their common good, thereby making possible the development of reason and freedom.

Hegel saw that the idea of freedom in the individual was inconsequential until this was “objectified” in the society as a whole through civic, economic, and governmental relationships (sittlichkeit) [10]. The rational constitution of society is premised on the same common good that informs freedom in our individual lives. Just as the Stoics had understood that all persons participate in the universal city of humanity (cosmopolis), so Hegel put this universality on legs, so to speak: history is the progress of freedom progressively embodied in concrete social forms within human civilization. The individual is not apart from society, but his or her freedom is established and protected through the network of social relationships.

In the 20th century, Jürgen Habermas has shown, through the systematic study of language, the inseparability of the individual from society, and the presuppositional nature of communicative rationality throughout the range of all human languages. Moral principles, like political principles, arise from the social matrix grounded in dialogue directed toward mutual understanding. Such communicative discourse is the foundation of the very possibility of language, and all instrumental and strategic uses of language are secondary and parasitic upon it. Communicative rationality therefore provides a critical theory of society, allowing us to use the ideal of communicative discourse as a critical tool to oppose the domination of instrumental and strategic uses of language that undercut democracy, freedom, and the communicatively grounded lifeworld [11].

Habermas is here in the tradition of T.H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, and Ernest Barker who argued that no form of benevolent dictatorship could truly represent the sovereign people because the general will, the very essence of the common good of society, could only be discerned through free democratic discussion and dialogue [12]. Communicative discourse is not an addendum to justice. It is the foundation of justice, freedom, and legitimate political authority.

All of these thinkers are pointing to the foundations of political legitimacy in various ways. These foundations are solid and incontrovertible to clear thinking persons. First, reason gives us universal ethical and political principles that form the foundation of legitimate political authority. Unless that authority ensures justice, freedom, equality, and integrity throughout society, it is illegitimate and must be transformed. Second, political authority is rooted in the common good of society and its only legitimate mandate is to promote that good. The common good is determined through free dialogue and discussion among citizens, never imposed by a minority. Political authorities who violate this foundation for their legitimacy must be removed and replaced by legitimate governmental representatives of the people.

Third, legitimate government promotes and protects the freedom of citizens. Freedom here does not mean freedom to follow irrational desires and passions apart from governmental interference. Freedom is what arises from the embracing matrix of society and is both made possible and protected by that societal framework. Finally, legitimate political authority is necessarily universal. Whether the principles of justice and freedom were thought to derive from God or from natural human reason, they were always linked to our common humanity and not thought to be merely conventional and relative to particular societies and circumstances. Therefore all attempts to fragment and relativize the foundations of political legitimacy violate this universality and lose their rational, binding force.

The concept of “sovereignty” has a number of overlapping meanings that should be clarified. To do this justice an entire treatise would be needed, but here I will only make some basic distinctions [13]. The Middle Ages had developed a concept of the sovereignty of the people in which it was declared that the temporal authority ruled with the consent of the governed and for the good of the governed. The sovereignty of the ruler, such as a king, carried the meaning that the king had ultimate temporal power.

However, the sovereignty of this political power was subordinate to the natural law, coming from God, which saw the king’s authority as representing the sovereignty of the people because the ruler ruled in their name.

Later the concept of sovereignty also began to be linked to the authority of a government over a “sovereign” territory. A nation-state came to be thought of as having an absolute authority over its territory and internal affairs. These concepts of “sovereign state” and “sovereign ruler” were all along secondary to the sovereignty of the people in whose name, and with whose consent, these rulers or nation-states ruled.

The criterion of universality, overwhelmingly affirmed by the dominant philosophical tradition in the West, is ill-suited to sovereign territorial boundaries. The natural law, the principles of reason, the jus gentium, and the sovereignty of the people all apply universally to all civilized peoples everywhere, just as does today’s UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Sovereign nation-state borders, therefore, violate any intelligible conception of the common good; they violate human social and moral solidarity and universality.

Each of the above thinkers attributed universality to the moral and rational foundations for political authority. These concepts apply to all humanity. They cannot be effectively or legitimately applied at the territorial level exclusive of the rest of humanity. In his writings of the 1790s Kant pointed this out repeatedly. Similarly, Spinoza, Hobbes, and Hegel identified the system of sovereign nations as inherently a war system. War is precisely what violates a legitimate social contract. The system of sovereign nation-states was and is, as ant proclaimed, intrinsically a war-system and must be morally and physically resisted [14]. It is not grounded in any substantive reality but only in the contingent circumstances of territorial power-struggles. Sovereign territorially bound states constitute a “barbaric” violation of the universal principles of political right.

Just as Hobbes had adopted a misconceived atomism in which individuals were thought of prior to government as egos in a war over power, possessions, and self-aggrandizement so David Hume declared that “reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” [15]. Hobbes undercut the common social matrix of human freedom, and Hume undercut the capacity of reason to discern universal ethical and political principles and prioritize these as the true ends of human life over and beyond the passions. Hume’s view came to dominate not only in the theory of capitalism but in the “political realism” of nation-states in external relations with one another struggling in a lawless war system for “power upon power.” Reason, both within capitalism and within the system of sovereign nation-states, becomes merely an instrument in the struggle for domination and the power of the stronger to exploit the weaker.

The tradition that came to dominate in the West and spread worldwide drew on philosophical ideas that have since proved to be mistaken. Both the natural rights tradition and the related social contract tradition tended to see individuals as prior to the social matrix. They viewed human societies as composed of a multitude of atomic individual persons who composed society merely as a collection of individual wills. They viewed persons as having “natural rights” prior to their social constitution within the whole of society.

This ersatz individualism was mirrored in the fragmented individualism of the system of sovereign nation-states and in the idea of “negative freedom” in which people mistakenly see themselves as autonomous individuals whose freedom consists in their ability to limit and resist governmental authority. These concepts violate the holism that has emerged within both the natural and social sciences during the 20th century. In both Hobbes and Hume political right was undermined and fragmented into either a war of individual persons in the state of nature or the war-system of lawless militarized nation-states. Reason is not the slave of the passions and human beings are not isolated atoms prior to the social matrix that constitutes the social nature of the self and its freedom.

Part Two: Transforming today’s Illegitimate World System.

Today, in all nations, freedom is violated, reason is violated, the common good is violated, and universality is violated [16]. The system as a whole and every so-called “sovereign” nation within it is thereby void of legitimacy. Human beings are morally obligated to revolt against this utterly corrupt world system and establish a world system that is politically, economically, and morally legitimate. The blueprint and gold standard for such a legitimate world system is found in the Constitution for the Federation of Earth [17].

Many scholars have declared that the present world system of so-called sovereign nation-states was first articulated in the Peace Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 at the end of the Thirty Years War in Europe [18]. In the 17th century there may have been some practical value to defining absolute territorial boundaries with governments having central control over their internal affairs and independence in foreign affairs.

However, not only were the governments of that period not democracies responsible to their citizens and the common good, they were part of a fragmented world system that was and is intrinsically a war-system. The 18th century struggles for democracy involved the attempt to establish governments accountable to justice and the common good within these fragmented territories. However, each government had to violate freedom and the common good insofar as it had to be militarized to provide national security within a lawless world system. Kant’s 1795 essay Perpetual Peace draws this conclusion explicitly, calling the international order “savage and barbaric,” and declaring the absolute moral obligation of human beings to move beyond this lawless war-system to an Earth Federation “akin to a civil constitution.”

The socialist movements of the 19th century added a new dimension to these struggles for politically legitimate governments. As Karl Marx declared, political democracy was a great step forward, but it could not rise to a status of economic democracy, which was the source of genuine legitimacy. Marx also recognized the social foundation of genuine freedom:

Only in community (with others) has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible…. The illusory community, in which individuals have up till now combined, always took on an independent existence in relation to them, and was at the same time, since it was the combination of one class over against another, not only a completely illusory community, but a new fetter as well. In the real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association. [19]

As long as bourgeois democracy prevailed, the capitalist ruling class would colonize the political process in its own interests and establish, in effect, an oligarchy, a system that was democratic only in name. Reason, justice, equality, freedom, and the common good are thereby all violated and bourgeois governments, Marx recognized, are simply not legitimate. They need to be overthrown in the name of genuine economic and political democracy, in the name of human freedom and true democracy. A democratic socialism that respects these four principles is alone legitimate: “It goes without saying that all forms of the state have democracy for their truth and that they are therefore untrue insofar as they are not democracy” [20].

Today, we reap the consequences of the failure of the 19th century struggles to establish a legitimate political order for the Earth. 60% of the Earth’s population live in dire poverty while the top 20% own 94% of all the wealth in the world. The rapacious system of capitalism recognizes no rational ethical principles to govern it, declaring that economic laws are merely following impersonal science. Simultaneously, this egregious system throws more than a trillion US dollars per year down the toilet of militarism, with weapons of such power that their major use would wipe out humanity.

Everywhere human rights are violated; everywhere national security trumps democratic due process as well as environmental protections. Everywhere, the 1% who own 50% of the world’s wealth use their vast wealth to destroy democratic processes, buy legislators, bribe officials, and establish more laws to benefit themselves. Today’s world system manifests the tight interface of global capitalism and the system of militarized sovereign territorial fragments. The economic system destroys legitimate political authority and the nation-state system destroys all political and moral legitimacy for any and all nations. Nonviolent revolutionary action is required of all thoughtful, decent people [20].

Ernest Barker points out that there is a universalizing dialectic inherent in democratic social organization and in world history. Democracy promotes the liberty of its citizens, but not individual freedoms alone. For there is a deeper freedom emerging from the critical discussions within society that can be called the common good or general will. The dialogue directed toward mutual understanding that Habermas identified as the essence of democracy and political legitimacy is blocked and deformed by the strategic manipulations of sovereign nation-states. For Barker, as Habermas, we must unite the individual seeking his or her own good with the universal framework for liberty as manifested in the entire human community. Barker writes: “We can imagine a high measure of general liberty under a system of national societies and national States. We can imagine a perfect liberty only in a world society and a world State” [21]

Nonviolent revolutionary action directed toward this “perfect liberty” is manifested in working for ratification of the Constitution for the Federation of Earth [22]. The Earth Constitution embodies the rational ethical and political principles of justice and equality. It embodies the focus on the common good (the only legitimate common good is that of all humanity). It embodies the principle of socially constructed and protected freedom and, not least of all, it embodies true universality. Today, with human beings living as a single species on a tiny interdependent planet, any arrangement that does not embody the entire globe is necessarily illegitimate.

The sovereignty of the people means that the sole justification for political authority is the safety, welfare, and freedom of the entire community. These features are not external to the matrix of the entire social body. They are not external to the constitution of the community but are internal to its composition. They arise from a properly constituted community. As Emery Reves pointed out with great clarity in 1945, it is an absurd contradiction attempt to divide the sovereignty of the people into absolute territorial boundaries, where sovereignty magically stops at one place and begins again at the next with a different group of people [23]. The people who are sovereign are human beings, with the same rights and responsibilities everywhere on Earth.

In the 21st century we see clearly that neither security nor well-being nor freedom can exist within territorially bound sovereign nation-states. The very existence of other such states within a militarized, lawless world order defeats the foundations of legitimacy for each and every state. The social-political community, rooted in the sovereignty of the people, is today necessarily that of humankind as a whole. The people of Earth are sovereign and their security, well-being, and freedom can only be realized on the global scale. To fragment humanity into some 193 territorially bound militarized states is to defeat the very concept of legitimate government everywhere on Earth.

The logic of history, the principles of human reason, and the moral foundations of political authority all demand an Earth Federation under the rule of democratically legislated and enforceable laws. Government is not the enemy of freedom. Good government is what makes freedom possible at all levels beyond the smallest communities. However, the historical human project of freedom remains unrealizable under the present world system of global capitalism and sovereign nation-states. Unless we recognize that the only possible community to be constituted under democratic political authority protecting our security, well-being, and freedom is the community of humankind, we are necessarily doomed to political tyranny and possibly to the extinction of our human species.

Democracy is the key means for nonviolent historical social change through dialogue, debate, and discussion. The founding of our global social contract, therefore, is not the end of history but rather the end of a violent and chaotic prehistory for humanity. It is the beginning of mature, self-conscious history. For the first time human beings will have the rational means for discussing the socially constructed common good for humanity as a whole. It raises freedom to a higher level.

The Earth Federation based on the Earth Constitution founds legitimate political government for the world as a global social contract based fully, for the first time in history, on the principles of political right. Unlike the current world disorder that evolved in a contingent, fortuitous, and haphazard manner consisting in invasions, subversions, arbitrary territorial divisions, the Earth Constitution consciously establishes our human political and economic reality on the principles of democratic legitimacy outlined in this essay. It explicitly embodies the drive to global economic, political, and human rights based justice; it explicitly federates the world under these principles as universal; it embodies dozens of mechanisms to promote, protect, and enhance socially constituted freedom, and it focuses on the common good of the planet and its citizens.

We have before us the opportunity to transform our world on a truly democratic and environmentally sustainable foundation. The Earth Constitution provides both a blueprint and an ideal for overcoming tyranny and avoiding extinction. It recognizes the sovereignty of humanity as well as the unity in diversity of all peoples. It can only come into full force through being ratified by the majority of people on Earth. It founds our common human political organization on the principles of security, well-being, and freedom that are the ground and the source of all political legitimacy. It represents a huge step forward in our human civilizational project of actualizing freedom and dignity within a sustainable planetary civilization.

Ours is a truly revolutionary situation. Either we ratify the Earth Constitution or we wallow in continued massive injustice, illegitimacy, and environmental destruction. Now is the time to act. The fate of humanity and future generations may well rest on our generation alone. We need to ratify the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.

Notes:
[1] Cicero. On the Commonwealth and On the Laws. James E.G. Zetzel, ed. Cambridge University Press, 1999.
[2] Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. First Part of the Second Part, Question 6: “The Theological Virtues.” This insight has been repeated in contemporary thought, for example, by John Finnis in Natural Law and Natural Rights, Clarendon Press, 1980, as one of the seven primary goods discernable by human reason.
[3] Johannes Althusius. Politica. Frederick S. Carney, trans. Liberty Fund Inc. Publisher, 1995.
[4] Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan. John Plamenatz, ed. Merridian Books, 1963.
[5] Baruch Spinoza. Theological-Political Treatise. Second Edition. Samuel Shirley, trans. Hackett Publishers, 1998.
[6] Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Social Contract and Discourses. G. D. H. Cole, trans. E. P. Dutton & CO, 1947.
[7] Kant, Immanuel. The Metaphysical Elements of Justice. John Ladd, trans. New York: Library of the Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merrill
Company, 1965. For an account of this duty to help society evolve toward ever-greater freedom, see the Introduction by John Ladd.
[8] Immanuel Kant. Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. H. J. Paton, trans. Harper & Row, 1964.
[9] Immanuel Kant. Perpetual Peace. Louis White Beck, trans. Macmillan, 1957.
[10] G.W.F. Hegel. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Allen W. Wood, ed. Cambridge University Press, 1991.
[11] Jürgen Habermas. The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume Two: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Thomas McCarthy, trans. Beacon Press, 1987.

[12] Errol E. Harris. Twenty-first Century Renaissance: From Plato to Neoliberalism to Planetary Democracy. Institute for Economic Democracy Press, 2008, Chapter 2.
[13] See Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber, eds. State Sovereignty as Social Construct. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Stephen D. Krasner. Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy. Princeton University Press, 1999. Daniel Philpott. Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations. Princeton University Press, 2001.
[14] Immanuel Kant. The Metaphysical Elements of Justice. John Ladd, trans. New York: Library of the Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965.
[15] David Hume. Treatise on Human Nature. Book II: Of the Passions, Part 3, section 3.
[16] See James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, et. al. Empire with Imperialism: The Globalizing Dynamics of Neo-liberal Capitalism. Zed Books, 2005. Terry Boswell and Christopher Chase-Dunn. The Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism: Toward Global Democracy.
Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000. Sheldon Wolin. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Spector of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton University Press, 2008.
[17] Glen T. Martin, ed. A Constitution for the Federation of Earth: With Historical Introduction, Commentary, and Conclusion. Institute for Economic Democracy Press, 2010. It is also found on-line in many places and languages such as at: http://www.radford.edu/~gmartin/CEF.pdf It can easily be found through a Google on-line search.
[18] See, e.g., Philpott, op.cit.
[19] Karl Marx. The German Ideology in Robert C. Tucker, ed. The Marx-Engels Reader, W.W. Norton & Company, 1978, p. 197.
[20] Karl Marx. Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in Ibid. p. 21.
[21] Ernest Barker. Reflections on Government, Oxford University Press, 1967, p. 28.
[22] See Glen T. Martin. Ascent to Freedom: Practical and Philosophical Implications of Democratic World Law. Institute for Economic Democracy Press, 2008. Glen T. Martin. Triumph of Civilization: Democracy, nonviolence, and the Piloting of Spaceship Earth. Institute for Economic Democracy Press, 2010.
[23] Emery Reves. The Anatomy of Peace. Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1945.