 The ideological influence of such theories in the struggles for representative government and decolonization was immense. Few now deny, in the words of the United States’ Declaration of Independence, that all governments “deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed”, and it is perhaps not too much to say that consent has become the “gold standard” for political authority (and, indeed, for a theory of any political power; Buchanan 2002).