In a limited government, the power of government to intervene in the exercise of civil liberties is restricted by law, usually in a written constitution. It is a principle of classical liberalism, free market libertarianism, and some tendencies of liberalism and conservatism in the United States. The theory of limited government contrasts, for example, with the ideal that government should intervene to promote equality and opportunity through regulation of property and wealth redistribution.
In the United States, as discussed in the Federalist Papers, the idea of limited government originally implied the notion of a separation of powers and the system of checks and balances promoted by the U.S. Constitution. This understanding of limited government maintains that government is internally limited by the system of checks and balances as well as the Constitution itself, which can be amended, and externally through the republican principle of electoral accountability. Such an understanding of limited government, as explained by James Madison, does not place arbitrary and ideologically biased parameters on the actions of a government thus allowing government to change as time demands.
"Limited government" stands in contrast to the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings. Under that doctrine, the king, and by extension his entire government, held unlimited sovereignty over its subjects. Limited government exists where some effective limits restrict governmental power. In Western civilization, the Magna Carta stands as the early exemplar of a document limiting the reach of the king's sovereignty. While its limits protected only a small portion of the English population, it did state that the king's barons possessed rights which they could assert against the king. The English Bill of Rights associated with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 established limits of royal sovereignty. In contrast, and as stated in the above paragraph, The United States Constitution of 1787 created a government limited by the terms of the written document itself, by the election by the people of the legislators and the executive, and by the checks and balances through which the three branches of government limited each other's power.
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Famous quotes containing the words limited and/or government:
“We must believe that He permits it [this war] for some wise purpose of his own, mysterious and unknown to us; and though with our limited understandings we may not be able to comprehend it, yet we cannot but believe, that he who made the world still governs it.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final Note stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.”
—Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940)