This follows the post of my thoughts on an idealistic society with no government, which could be literally defined as an anarchist state.
The basis of an anarchy is the idea that there is no government, and no supreme authority. As I mentioned in the page on anarchy, this could only work if people were in some way ideally moralistic. A true anarchy would not be able to have an army (and if it did, would only be able to recruit voluntarily), and could not have a hierarchy.
In order to govern any group of people there must be some way of leveraging power so that things can get done.
From the dawn of civilisation to the present day this power has generally been concentrated into the hands of one person (e.g. a king) or select few individuals (e.g. a noble class), through fear, force, and sometimes the need to be stronger than your adversaries. Western examples include Ancient Egypt, Persia and the Roman Empire.
Some societies in the past, including successful ones, thrived by diluting the power of the individual and, more importantly, allowing for a safer environment for the individual to express himself. Excellent Western examples are Ancient Athens and the early Roman Republic. Despite the fact that only a proportion of the population had a voice in these societies, and women generally were excluded, this contrasted dramatically with societies where the elite few held all the power. Debating and persuasion skills were highly influential, and reaching a consensus became critical to success. These were societies where ideas and experiment thrived, and for this reason they came to influence the world around them and wield more power.
Without power, whether brought about through brute force and fear, or through consensus, there will always be some resistance to any action in large communities, limiting the achievement of aims.
Consensus is common in small societies such as hunter-gatherer communities, especially where there is a more obvious advantage to the individual being part of the community, and doing things communally. In such societies the cost for following your own desires over those of the group as a whole, and the benefits received, are generally outweighed by the advantage of being together and achieving your aims within the community. Furthermore the possibility of cheating, by taking more than you are expected to put in to your community, is limited.
In most larger societies an individual can be supported while taking more than they receive, and conversely can end up putting more in than they benefit! Also, democratically reaching a consensus over decisions is much harder, only really being imaginable (if at all) in a highly educated society. As a result larger societies are generally run and survive governed by an imbalance of power, where one or more individuals hold power over the others. By having power, they can police infractions, and enforce their will over others.
Most political systems vary in how this power is derived (who controls it), on how the entity wielding the power obtains it, how the power is limited or checked, and lastly on how the entity wielding the power can be removed.
The next few posts describe briefly various alternative systems of organised government, starting with when the power is held by an individual.