Conscription has been a fact of life in most civilizations that have maintained the tradition of a "citizen army". In ancient Athens and Sparta, in the early Roman Republic, and in other countries who prided themselves on their status as Republics or Democracies, mandatory military service was a way of insuring that citizens were responsible for the preservation of their own freedoms. The alternative to this philosophy was exemplified by the paid professional armies of powers like Persia, and by the mercenary armies of the Roman Empire. These professional armies posed two threats to the State : They tended to be independent entities with loyalties to their own generals and as such were constant threats to the standing government, and they created a disconnection between on the one hand rights and freedoms, and on the other the duty to protect them. For these reasons, professional armies came to be associated with totalitarian states.

The notion of a citizen army was a strong tenet of the young United States of America, but the scale of ensuing conflicts meant that an army of volunteers was sufficient. At the onset of the Civil War, numbers among the standing Union army were insufficient to suppress the Confederate rebellion, but the cause was unpopular enough to prevent the needed influx of recruits. For Lincoln, the answer was a draft. The abuses were many, including the use of paid substitutes by the wealthy, but the end result was successful.

Conscription or required military service is not necessarily the hallmark of representational government, though. The Prussian Army, one of the most effective of the 18th and 19th Centuries was essentially a conscript force serving under a brutal, repressive government.