Limited government
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Limited government" is most commonly government where its functions and powers are prescribed, limited, and restricted by law, usually in a written constitution. This is the concept covered in detail by this entry.
"Small government" is most commonly government that choses to vest most power in others, usually private enterprise and citizens. Another term used to describe this meaning is minarchism.
These terms have no legal status anywhere at this time, and were coined for political and ideological reasons in response to "big government" - government involving excessive bureaucracy.
[edit] Contrast of US and UK sovereignty
This contrasts strongly (and probably causally) with government in Britain, certainly at the time and arguably even in modern times, where government is limited by nothing more than convention.
The difference may be attributed to different conceptualizations of sovereignty. In the United States, sovereignty is thought to rest with the people; although one could argue that the Constitution is sovereign in its own right, the Constitution has legal force primarily because of its ratification by the people; consequentially, the power to design the form of government - and thus sovereignty - must rest with the people, being the ultimate arbiter of the method of government, rather than the document that they approve); through the constitution, the people loan to the government certain powers.
In Britain, by contrast, sovereignty rests with the Crown and Parliament; power is delegated from these bodies as they see fit (q.v. the recent enthusiasm for devolution in Scotland, Wales and England's regions). Although there is a huge body of law and tradition in the UK that effectively creates an unwritten constitution, these laws are subject to arbitrary changes by the government at any time (q.v. the 2003 decision of the Blair government to abolish the office of the Lord Chancellor).
In America, the concept of limited government flows naturally from the assumption of popular sovereignty: If the people are sovereign, then any powers had by government are "given on loan", and detract from the people's innate sovereignty. Therefore such powers are inherently limited. In Britain, the concept of limited government requires more convoluted reasoning: When the government is sovereign, then any powers they lend other sub-governments detract from their own freedom of action. As a consequence, even if British politicians expouse devolution as having the primary aim of bringing government closer to the people (a key concept of limited government, as discussed in Tocqueville's Democracy in America), and even if they succeed in that endeavour, their conceptualizaton of the flow of that power is very different to the thought process that lead to the hierarchical model of government in the US. Devolution involves giving power to sub-entities closer to the people; this implies that the power is government's to give to people in the first place; in America, power is given to the government by the people. See also Lakoff's Moral Politics for more discussion on how conceptual systems can determine (or at least strongly affect) perception. In modern times, Libertarians identify strongly with the concept of limited government. In the past, Republicans identified with the concept of limited government.
