Definition of Government

I have been thinking a lot about government and how to properly define it. One concern I had was that of arbitrariness. What I mean by this is how to distinguish the state from other forms of authority. If one owns a large estate and makes rules for how the inhabitants live, does one act as a government?

I believe the answer is no. My definition of government is common governance of a collection of multiple, differently owned pieces of property. Furthermore, anarchism is the condition of a collection of multiple properties having no common governance. Revisiting the question I posed, the estate owner is exercising property-authority (authority over one's property), not government authority (authority over multiple properties).

Something else to consider: a society could be stateless yet non-anarchist. Such is the case for a lone piece of property. To demonstrate my point, imagine if there were only one man left in the world. Obviously, he would be stateless (which sounds funny to say), but would he be an anarchist? Not really. Both anarchism and the state require multiple properties.

I think that my definition is useful, albeit in a limited way. It doesn't attempt to resolve the problem of how to establish the legitimacy of property ownership, which is integral to understanding a society's government-status. For example, what if a government were to simply declare that it owned all the properties? Would the society suddenly become stateless? I think not, but for reasons which are outside of the scope of my definition. However, I might write about this and other issues in later posts.