ls and groups, he observes, inevitably create friction, conflict, and strife within society. Accordingly, government is needed to regulate and resolve these conflicts in an orderly and peaceable fashion. Modern students of government tend to focus on the manner in which such differences are resolved.
             Considerations surrounding the need for government are not easily separated from those relating to its origins. There are, broadly speaking, two schools of thought, with variations within them, concerning the origins of government.
             Organic Theory. Prior to the 17th century most political philosophers subscribed to an organic view of the origins of the state and government. In his Politics, Aristotle maintains that man is by nature a social being who, unlike a god or a beast, cannot live outside society. The emergence of government, in Aristotle's account, parallels the growth of society that evolves from family or household units to a more complex, self-sufficient entity wherein individuals can achieve their intellectual and moral potential. In the 13th century Thomas Aquinas integrated this Aristotelian formulation into Christian thought by holding that the state and government are not artificial but, rather, natural, divinely ordained institutions.
             Contract Theory. The social-contract theorists represent the second major school of thought. They postulate a "state of nature," a state or condition in which individuals lived before the establishment of government. Government is created through the medium of a contract between individuals. The contract, in turn, specifies the terms under which people will be governed. The most notable exponents of the social-contract approach were the 17th-century English philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and the 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Although it is highly doubtful that governments actually came into being through this contractual process, the contractual mode of...