Hans F. Sennholz, “Government” (1992)

This is a brief political-philosophical note rather than a monograph or edited volume. Its scope is deliberately compressed: Sennholz offers a libertarian critique of government as an abstraction that conceals the actions of particular officials. The essay’s central move is demystification. It begins by denying that “government” is a visible, unified being, then redefines it as organized human coercion exercised by identifiable persons.

No man has ever seen a government.

From that opening, Sennholz argues that citizens falsely reify the state, treating it as sacred, benevolent, or impersonal. His language attacks civic reverence: people “petition,” “idolize,” and make “pilgrimages” to government buildings as though political authority were a deity. Against this, he insists that government has no independent moral personality.

Actually, government is no deity, no refuge and strength worthy of our adoration.

The essay’s key conceptual claim is that government is not an entity above society but a body of people exercising command over others. Sennholz names the actors—legislators, regulators, tax collectors, judges, policemen—and stresses that their titles do not transform coercive acts into morally self-evident authority.

It is an organization of people who watch over and control the affairs of other people.

This definition lets Sennholz shift the problem from institutional abstraction to moral justification. If officials are simply people, by what right do they direct the lives and property of other people? He concedes that protection of natural rights may be a legitimate service, but immediately narrows that concession by comparing it to other useful occupations. Protection does not automatically confer aristocratic authority.

It is difficult to find a moral foundation for the authority of these people over their fellow men.

Historically, Sennholz contends, those entrusted with protection have often turned into rulers, oligarchs, and tyrants. His invocation of Jefferson supports a constitutional suspicion of power rather than trust in benevolent administration. The essay’s late contrast is between the founders’ “jealousy” of power and modern dependence on state favors, benefits, entitlements, and public works. In Sennholz’s view, welfare-state politics converts questions of right into struggles over command and distribution.

The closing aphorism gives the piece its practical and moral conclusion: state power survives by extracting resources and obedience, and its limits depend on resistance by those subject to it.

Political power always feeds on its spoils; it dies when its victims refuse to be despoiled.

The relevance of the note lies in its concise statement of a classical liberal or libertarian suspicion: political language can hide personal domination behind institutional reverence. Sennholz’s argument is not a detailed policy analysis but a conceptual warning. To speak clearly about government, he suggests, is to stop worshiping an abstraction and to ask what specific people are doing to other specific people, under what moral warrant, and at whose expense.