It would appear, though there are other possible contenders, that the curious invention of the term “limited government” represents the possibly greatest political oxymoron ever manufactured in the entire historical discourse of political philosophy or political science; and, political epistemology is surely involved. 

Realistically, it is of the very nature of government to expand, so how can the questionable notion arise that it can be really limited?   Most likely, it is an expression of an ideal or aspiration that inclines toward the grand hope that whatever political order exists may resist the tendency, held here to be natural to an instrumentality of power, to grow and grow until it may reach the practical limits of its greatest extension of power — unless, perhaps, resisted by a countervailing power.

Origins of the Term

Obviously, what is referred to as classical Liberalism had originally developed the odd notion of limited government, as in the saying that the government which governs least governs best; this kind of phrase has been, e. g., attributed to Thomas Jefferson, though, in fact, he never said something that simplistic.  Some words that he wrote may seem fairly close, however, to the basic sentiment that is then generally expressed as such. 

Today, and for about a century or so, those denominated as conservatives, in this country, have usually adopted support for the idea of limited or circumscribed government that stays basically, for instance, within the limits of the US Constitution; this is, therefore, as to its then original epistemological understanding as a political charter of restricted government.

However, as classical Liberalism had mutated, from the late 19th into the mid-20th century, into modern Liberalism qua Socialism (AKA collectivism), it became the case that Conservatism, in America, had functionally changed into what, mostly, used to be considered classical Liberalism.  Good related reading would cover such interesting books as James Kalb’s The Tyranny of Liberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command.

Government, if it appropriately consists of true governance in noted terms of providing that needed balance between liberty and order for yielding an ordered liberty qua liberal order, is supposed to be a truly positive thing; thus, this means that, theoretically at least, the useful growth of government ought to be a really good occurrence because more government then equates, logically by definition, with the provision for a more ordered liberty, the rational and wise protection of civil social freedom, under law. 

The civil rights and civil liberties of the governed are, moreover, then to be better and better rightfully secured against any ruthless, tyrannical, or arbitrary power by the warranted authority that rightly resides in the proper government of law, not of the arbitrary regime of men.  Therefore, the impressive theory sort of sounds great to those who do support limited government as, in effect, meaning good government, meaning, essentially, a polity designed to rationally maximize requisite liberty under law.

Historically, the political idea of trying to control the power of government became more vivid, for the Western peoples, in the 16th to 18th centuries, in terms of a growing hatred toward such concepts as the Divine Right of Kings, Erastianism, and Enlightened Despotism; the former two were, increasingly challenged by the old Liberalism and the last named had once been found mostly acceptable by that ideology, meaning when, e.g., the French philosophes could, thus, decide which monarch might be supposedly worthy enough to be so pleasantly despotic toward the common people.    

This was while the favored autocrat was, of course, still intelligently pursuing the generalized goals of the Enlightenment in known terms of, for instance, secularizing the society, weakening the Church, and rationalizing the then resultant life and culture of his society; the last point being, thus, accomplished reasonably through either the immediate or progressive eradication of custom, tradition, and rampant superstition that all seemed, more or less, to be superstition to an enlightened or liberal mind of the 18th or 19th centuries; that was the basic direction or attitude of thought to be found on the political or ideological Left concerning the need to destroy anything thought to be reactionary.  

Important reading would include Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Leftism Revisited: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot, Heinrich A. Rommen’s The State in Catholic Thought and his The Natural Law, and, for some amplication, E. B. F. Midgley’s The Natural Law Tradition and the Theory of International Relations.

On the other hand, the political right also vigorously opposed the centralization of the growing power of the nation-state, as did, e. g., Juan de Mariana who had prominently stressed the good defense of proper localism and the ancient rights and privileges of a society of social estates.

This was because it was much easier to maintain smaller pockets of local free towns and villages versus the ever advancing consolidation of the State that then meant the enlarging enhancement of its war-making capacities, extortionate levels of taxation, and the truly obnoxious stranglehold of the many bureaucratic servants of the monarchies upon the nations, moving into the modern age; the peoples involved, in terms of a progressive modernity, were to be, thence, dominated by these nation-states and their aforementioned political, economic, and military consequences. 

In France, as a more particular historico-political example, the regrettable crushing of the aristocratic and other factions of the Fronde civil wars, in the 17th century, finally had the sad consequence of completely destroying any independent and viable power that could have had developed the needed capacity to then effectively stop the antidemocratic, bureaucratic, and despotic trend toward the observed centralization and, moreover, notably continued autocratic development of the French monarchy.

By the late 18th century and into the 19th century, therefore, what had congealed, finally, into the idea of having limited government was the political result of people, in the United States of America and in Europe, deciding that traditional monarchical regimes had amassed too much power.

In America, this lead to the great and brilliant success of the American Revolution that significantly produced the US Constitution in an attempt to control the exercise of power by government in the hope of producing a limited government; one of the major purposes of a written, as opposed to a unwritten constitution, is the valiant attempt to actually specify the political circumference of what and how much governance ought to legally, constitutionally, exist for this country; and, again, this is also a matter of political epistemology. 

The French Revolution, on the other hand, as Hannah Arendt and others had correctly pointed out, was not a true revolution because it merely furthered the authoritarian tendency and natural systemic flow of the despotic orientation of the political actualities, inherent already, well within what had been the autocratic, French monarchical regime.  

Limited government was, thus, definitely not the noted result of the production of that “revolutionary” regime, which was actually even more reactionary than what it had replaced in terms of rampant tyranny, injustice, corruption, and oppression; it lead, predictably, to the expected victory of a Caesar, meaning Napoleon, who, later, had crowned/styled himself to be an emperor through a vile form of democratic despotism, so greatly similar, in many (not all) respects, to Enlightened Despotism, of course.

America Considered As a Test Case

In the USA, however, the last attempt to try to effectively stop the unfortunate consolidation of a nation-state regime was the noble and righteous effort of the War for the Southern Confederacy, the War for Southern Independence, that later ended up being totally incorrectly denominated as the American Civil War. 

It was not at all, in fact, a civil war; when two or more parties seek the control of the exactly same government for ruling a nation, then, by correct definition, that is a civil war; the South, the Confederate States of America, however, did not ever seek to rule the North; it just simply wanted full independence as a separate new nation. 

Strangely, the War for Southern Independence was, uniquely, among the only one of such wars of national liberation not enthusiastically hailed by most of the progressives and liberals of the 19th century; this was, moreover, even though both the North, for over 80 years, and South were slave-holding powers, ironically and factually, at the beginning of that conflict.   As a then most prominent exception in the 19th century, Lord Acton, an outspoken advocate of political liberty, clearly saw the true and undeniable justice of the Southern cause of independence.  

Good reading, on this subject, would include:  The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War by Thomas J. DiLorenzo; also, Thomas E. Woods, Jr.’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and his 33 Questions about American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask; and, H. W. Crocker III’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War.  Many people, thus, need to learn more about the War of Northern Aggression.

That extremely terrible conflict, due to the immoral unconditional victory of the Union, had, therefore, forever substantially revolutionized the USA and, furthermore, set it on the easily observed course of continually strengthening the national government, today just simply called the Federal government, at the expense of the governments of the once sovereign states. 

The transition of America, due to the War Between the States, into then logically becoming, increasingly, a European-style nation-state, not sanctioned anywhere at all in the Constitution by the way, has had definite political, social, cultural, economic, and other direct and indirect consequences; and, for instance, prominent neoconservatives such as Mark Levin, author of Liberty and Tyranny, are very staunch defenders of the historical and political cause of the Union who, therefore, do greatly revere the memory of Abraham Lincoln.

Crescively, decade by decade, it then became more difficult to try to keep to a limited government as the power and extended reach of the Federal government, especially during the 20th century, became so practically unbounded; this is as then compared, logically, to the political idea of a written constitution, thus, defining a limited government.   Into the 21st century, therefore, it is almost toally forgotten that federalism once was supposed to mean the legitimate practice of having a federal, not consolidated, government that had consisted of the bilateral governance of a national government acting with and through the coordination of the governments of the states.

Today, the term “limited government” can only rationally be looked upon as a silly joke, an archaism, in that the evident and historical force of statism and its twin called tyranny is the prevalent norm that regularly dictates the fundamental course of basic events for this country, not the old or archaic notion of free, constitutional, republican government qua legitimate governance.

The Constitution had, long ago, become a very plastic or protean thing, a “living document,” that can easily grow the prolific power of this nation-state to any imaginable limits and beyond, if ideologically-progressively thought needed; the welfare-warfare State, especially since the 1930s, therefore, knows no real or empirical bounds to its logically inherent expansiveness with its devotion to the American imperium structured firmly around the entire globe.  Into the 21st century, therefore, the massive growth of a highly interventionist Federal government, spending public money at a very fantastically prodigious rate, would seem to be, thus, a logical result of the collectivist ideological spirit that naturally impells such activity.

And yet, wasn’t this all quite reasonably predictable (in retrospect)?   How so?   A government thought to be or, perhaps, said to be limited would seem only to actually be the a.) farcical effort at semantic or polemical exaggeration in that any government truly limited could not, by definition, realistically be then accounted a government at all, or b.)  if limited, it would quite soon come to the “suicidal” conclusion that such a political order could not justify itself to itself, through the both integral and logical self-acknowledgement of its own inherent and proclaimed limitations as such. 

Can Government Really Be Limited?

In short, therefore, the obvious empirical case would rationally appear, on the surface at least, to be a completely absurd contradiction and perpetual paradox; this is, moreover, because the two words, as a united term, would seem to be at perpetual and needful war with the meaning of each other’s intent and nature.   If it is, in fact, a true government, it could not be really limited in its demonstrable nature and intent; if it is said to be, in fact, limited, then, equally, it would have to logically then cease to be what it claims that it supposedly is, as to the explicitly defined actuality, represented by the set term: limited government.

Government, by definition, claims to itself the sole monopoly of (rightful) force over a given territory or area held to be under its control as, thus, being defined as a sovereign state, meaning almost always conceived as a nation-state situation; any limitation placed upon political sovereignty was to be considered within the nature of a country’s actual constitution and not to be determined by any external sources of power, though kept within the sphere of classical Natural Law teachings. 

Ideally and in terms of cognate political right, the given authority granted to a polity by a constitution, written or unwritten, and supposedly freely consented to by the people of a country yields thence to the sovereign state the then logically associated political power to exercise reasonable and legitimate force; and, furthermore, this is then both within its own territory and, moreover, any requisite self-defense against any (foreign or domestic) aggressors. 

The illegitimate exercise of power without authority to do so is, however, unlawful and unwarranted force, meaning, e. g., despotism; it is, thus, the illegal usurpation of power concerning what is thought to be a legitimate appeal to legal and constitutional authority as to political right, which ought to be the logical basis for what is thought to be classified as limited government.   And yet, in the real world of men and nations, this has been rarely the observed case in fact. 

Tyranny, despotism, autocracy, totalitarianism, authoritarianism, Bonapartism, Peronism, etc. has usually been the basic historical norm for all of recorded time; but, it can be then correctly stated that free government has been, in fact, the truly notable exception to the general rule of an oppressive rulership over a country, region(s), or an entire empire; freedom is just an aberration or known rarity; oppression has been and is the typical norm; it is, thus, a natural condition regarding how people have themselves organized, within political structures, on a vast scale.  

Limited government, in its impossible empirical essence at any rate, needs then to be rationally relegated to the political philosophy category of a lovely political fiction; no actual government really worthy of the concrete designation as such has ever or will ever, therefore, be oddly assigned this quite absurd classification.

Conservatism Examined v. Limited Government As an Ideal

Another interesting comment, which would not occur to even the majority of political scientists, is that this presents an important dividing line forever separating American Conservatism, a form of classical Liberalism, from the thinking of the traditionalist right.  Conservatism largely upholds many fictive ideas, concepts, or aspirations that do not usually correspond to the real world in their idealism that must logically lead to a dead-end result; thus, conservatives, normally, support politicians who wish to uphold the welfare-warfare State, though they might claim, of course, to be otherwise disposed.  

But, one can empirically see, practically speaking, that electing Republicans has not really, on average, meant any absolutely significant reduction of the basic and observed trend toward Big Government; this would cover the period from the 1930s all the way up to the present, of course.

That legendary and noble paragon of great conservative virtue to the extreme, Pres. Ronald W. Reagan, when given the noted and splendid chance to truly make a definite empirical statement regarding his understanding of Conservatism, as to the idea of limited government, had then interestingly, of course, ended up further empowering a government agency:  Federal Emergency Management Agency (April 1984).  

In the previous year, Reagan had, moreover, signed Executive Order 12432; this then gave both the Department of Commerce and the US Small Business Administration, in consultation with the Cabinet Council on Commerce and Trade, extensive authority to manage the establishment, maintenance, and further intensification of federal minority business enterprise programs.   Yet another conservative politician, Pres. George W. Bush, when he was on the verge of his leaving office, had revealingly stated: “I’ve abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.”  

This quite extremely bizarre kind of illogical and greatly perverse thinking (as in, e. g., analogously, the purported need to kill someone for the then most noble sake of preventing him from being murdered) is so truly worthy of him, and many other prominent conservatives as well who have aided in creating Big Government.  

If Bush were, in fact, profoundly intellectually cognizant at the time, he would then have quickly said, oh no, what the heck did I just stupidly say?   Such an amazingly incoherent statement will, deservedly, go down in the preposterous and solemn recording of the annals of notably outstanding and ludicrous presidential trivia.  Q. E. D.

It has been politically well said, time and again, that the Democrats normally help to install the mostly unwieldy parts of Big Government; and, then, the Republicans, generally, come to the rescue by finding various ways and means to finance, regularize, systematize, and manage the welfare-warfare State to make it work, as reasonably as may be possible.   This is certainly why, therefore, the traditionalist right as well as Libertarianism rejects Conservatism as being the noted handmaiden of Big Government. 

The real question, upon an intensely close examination, is not so much the relative size of government that matters per se; what is greatly more indicative is what the existing government has been organized and directed to actually do both as to its existence and, moreover, what it empirically does to or against its people.

An apt illustration in the field of taxation can be usefully given as an analogous matter; the percentage of what the government takes in taxes is the true cause of what can logically result in over-taxation or confiscatory taxation; thus, the mere effect is the system of taxation, whether a progressive tax, flat tax, value-added tax, etc., that is, in effect, a mere diversion to simply take the minds of the people away from the actual percentage of tax being extracted.   

Thus, e. g., Dr. Walter E. Williams, a prominent free-market economist, carefully reminds people that the method or system of taxation is not really at all the extremely critical question regarding taxation; as examples often used, a flat tax v. progressive tax is, therefore, not truly the primary and critical issue in such a consideration or debate.   Intelligent minds are, moreover, able to then correctly and properly distinguish cause from effect.

If, therefore, a theoretically large political establishment were guaranteeing more than just sufficient prosperity for the citizenry by, e. g., allowing a true free-market economy to somehow really flourish unmolested, then such an expanded governmental presence could be then uniquely hailed as good government, not Big Government.  

The true problem is, as Dr. Milton Friedman had often tellingly remarked, if the American people ever got all the government they had paid for, they would be then living under a police-state tyranny.  Informed intellects, as can be seen, sagaciously do realize that the genuine issue is not an attempt to, supposedly, somehow achieve the fictional or utopian goal of a limited government, as desired by conservatives.

Conclusion

As understood, so correctly, by the political supporters of the traditionalist right, government qua governance, as rightfully pertaining to the basic and needful things that it ought to do, is what should  be properly stressed. 

The original understanding of the original purpose of the Constitution is what can be properly referred to as the boundaries of what the Federal political establishment refers to, meaning as to its noted and legitimate responsibilities of a limited, meaning described/written, nature.  And yet, the real question or issue at stake ought never to be simply put as being limited government versus Big Government per se.

For instance, since nothing in that document authorizes a Department of Education, then it can be known, by the definition of a written constitution, that the national government has, therefore, no legitimate business in the field of administering matters pertaining to national education. 

The Preamble, explicitly, states the formal basics, as to the direct political principles involved, of what that political charter is only supposed to cover and nothing more as to the objects and ends of its noted grant of power.   And, The Federalist Papers explain, among other appropriate sources, how the Federal government was properly constructed to operate toward the given goals of a constitutional kind; Publius (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay) details, therefore, the political epistemology requisite and needed for a free, constitutional, republican government of laws, not men.

Thus, e. g., being “for or against” limited government is a gross absurdity and, moreover, not a real political question at all, except, perhaps, for some abstractionizing political theoreticians.  The authentic Tory attitude is, forever, well expressed by Alexander Pope, who wrote:  “For Forms of Government let fools contest; whatever is best administered is best.”