Does government play a genuinely significant role in history, or is it simply a tool for interest groups to apply force on their behalf?

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One of the arguments Barbara Tuchman makes in The March of Folly was that England's loss of its North American colonies in the American Revolution was chiefly due to how their Parliamentary system was working at the time. Basically, it was easier for individual members to get re-elected with tough talk than to argue that it might be better to reach some accommodation with the colonists.

Even without that argument, if you read some of the prewar documents on both sides its pretty clear that the base of the disagreement was over government, and if some arrangement like the Dominion system had been offered early enough, it would have almost certainly been found acceptable.

T.E.D. 117408

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Does government play a genuinely significant role in history, or is it simply a tool for interest groups to apply force on their behalf?

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