The question of how governments should be organized—in particular, whether political authority should be centralized or whether it should arise from the people—is of secondary significance. The mode of organization (represented by columns in the table) becomes important only because it is closely linked in practice to the the system's objective. If the goal of a political system is to maintain freedom, then government based on centralized political authority is unlikely to serve that goal in the long run. Similarly, if the system's goal is to promote the "social good," then (as we shall see in later analysis) central economic planning, directed by bureaucratic mandates, will necessitate a highly autocratic structure in which democratic mechanisms play little or no role. Thus most combinations shown in the table do not represent viable long-run political alternatives.     

	Popular Government		Centralized Authority	Anarchy
	Representative	Direct
Freedom	liberal republic	*	*	anarcho-capitalism
"Good of society"/Personal Ends	mixed economy	direct democracy	communism, fascism	civil or feudal war

* unstable systems with no common designation indicates unstable systems

---

Previous