Lord Of The Flies Government Analysis

Lord of the Flies and the government crisis
A government is an organization in a community or political entity that has the power to enact and enforce laws and maintain peace and order. An effective government is necessary since it is considered the leadership of an organization, community or political entity. The government on the island in Lord of the Flies is no exception. William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies, is set on a remote island sparsely populated with young boys ages six to twelve who have become stranded and are trying desperately yet ineffectively to establish and maintain order and strive to create a civilization among them. However, they ultimately fail. The boys on the island in Lord of the Flies failed to effectively …show more content…
One reason the boys on the island failed to effectively govern themselves is because they lacked a system of separation of powers/checks and balances to prevent any one person from becoming too powerful. Baron de Montesquieu believed that the best government is one in which power is balanced among three separate branches of government with equal but different powers. He thought that England in the eighteenth century provided the best model of government because it divided power among three parts: the king, who enforced laws; the Parliament, which created laws; and a court system, which interpreted laws. Montesquieu’s main belief was that the best way to govern was to use a system he called “the separation of powers”. He felt that if all political power is handed over to one branch, greed and corruption inevitably result. As he writes in his book The Spirit of the Laws: “When the [lawmaking] and law-enforcing powers are hinted in the same person…there can be no liberty.” (“The Spirit of the Laws”). What he meant by this idea is that if any two powers of the three branches of government were possessed by a single person or branch, people would live unfree within society due to …show more content…
Then “[the judge] might behave with violence and oppression” (“The Spirit of the Laws”) because he would then have the law enforcing powers of the executive branch, and with the ability to create the laws that he has the ability to enforce, the judge can synthesize unfair and tyrannical laws, and would therefore have the force of an oppressor. In Lord of the Flies, the system of separation of powers was not implemented, causing issues including the deaths of multiple people throughout the story. At the beginning of the book in chapter one, Ralph blows the conch to have an assembly. They then immediately decide to vote for a chief, being Ralph. However, they did not have a vote for the representative of the other two branches in the system of separation of powers, leaving Ralph with full power to make, interpret, and enforce the laws. Further down the story, this leads to many conflicts, with Ralph starting to abuse his power, making unfair laws without consent and using his administrative power to enforce them on the other members on the island. In chapter five, Ralph demonstrates this when he calls the assembly to discuss the matters in the island. He is fed up by the lack of smoke for rescue, and so he decides to say, “Now I say this and make it a rule, because I’m chief. We won’t have