Are Governments Over Men or Men Over Governments?

[LandoRamone30]

 I notice a shift in the language and ideas of today compared to the first century and writings of that era. When I think about the state and the governments around the world, I have to ask what proceeds what. Do states and government proceed men and women or do men and women proceed governments. Here I'm using state and government interchangeably to be synonymous. From just reasoning, I know the United States of America is a fiction and a creation of men. The framers formed the concept of the United States of America of which didn't exist before it's creation. If not for men, this thing would not exist. If not for men acting as agents clothe in the garments of public service, the fiction could not act.  If men are the creators can it be said that men are slaves to their creations? Can it be said that men acting as servants can also be in command of men and women not in any such role? Same question worded differently, can a created thing be more than the beings that created it?

[ClearConscience]

Nobody in their right mind will understand what you're referring to when you mention that 1st century philosophers regard government differently than modern writers.  The only two philosophers I can imagine you're referring to are either Jesus, or Plato, and you would need to demonstrate that they showed some idea that government precedes society in order for me to even accept this premise, which I think is impossible.  However, objectively, no government precedes society, i.e. men never, under any circumstances, are a product of their government.  All governments, whether they be monarchies or democracies, are granted their power by the people.  That is the central tenet of Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes.  Government is a response to undesirable human interaction, and that is undeniably accepted by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  As far as political philosophy is concerned, there is no philosopher that I have ever read that ever, under any circumstance, even questioned the relationship between man and government in this way.  In all circumstances, man precedes government.  More specifically, government is a response to the fact that, in a state of nature, the individual benefits from immorality when interacting with his fellow man.  Hobbes referred to a similar idea of the prisoner's dilemma.  He showed that the role of governments, in society, is to take our daily interactions with one another, from being comparable to the prisoner's dilemma, into an interaction comparable to an assurance game.

I suppose I would need clarification regarding the question that you're asking.  Your preface is easily answered, and I'm not sure how it relates to the question about the created being greater than the creator.

[Mister Mister]

Government is a concept, I think that's what you're getting at.  Other concepts are love, marriage, justice, property, trade money, assault, theft, rape, murder, and so on.  These don't "exist" in the sense that material objects exist, but instead describe a relationship between objects, which we use to understand the world, to form general categories from individual instances.  Concepts can be useful, but they can also be misleading, when people forget they are just cognitive tools and think they exist in reality.  The fascinating thing about government is, everyone recognizes it as really important to how human society is ordered today, and about which everyone has lots of strong opinions about what government should and shouldn't be or do, but if you ask them to define it, these same people, on average do not have a clear idea of what government actually IS.  Nevertheless, they are certain about what kind of government is objectively good.

[Siegfried von Walheim]

While governments are not tangible, they are real. While they are not a thing of themselves, divorced from their parts, they do hold a collective level of accountability. 

 

In terms of the chicken-and-the-egg, it is man that created government as a means of managing people, for one reason or another. Then, the government influenced man either to serve government or some sort of creed the government was created to orient people towards.

 

Are the creators slaves to their own creations? Depends on the meaning of "slave". If by slave, you mean are owned by their creations, then of course not. While most men are "slaves" (I mean this broadly as few governments directly own people although they most often have some sort of carrot-and-stick relationship with people) to the state, the state itself is also a "slave" (in that it is beholden) to the powers that sustain it. Originally that power might have been its ideological founders and/or the army at its behest. However, just because some men "own" the government does not mean all men "own" the government, likewise just because most men are "slaves" to the government does not mean all men are. 

 

To repeat, for the sake of clarity: The founder is generally a "free man" (assuming "free" means "free of control") albeit beholden practically to either the military under his command, or morally to his ideology/religion, while the people that live under a government would fulfill the Greek definition of slaves insofar as they are beholden to a government, which is most often beholden (or "enslaved") to whatever sustains its power.

 

To answer the last two questions: A servant can hold leverage over his master, perhaps forming a de facto partnership much like the army to its general. The General is only the commander so long as the army is willing to accept orders from him, or so long as the enforcers of the General's orders are willing to enforce. 

 

And I would say a thing created can be worth more than the sum of its parts, like a cell phone is worth more than the stuff used to make it. Or, to use an easier example, a table is worth more than the materials used to make it at least because of the less-obvious cost of labor.