Authority and Legitimacy

A tax authority demands a portion of your income and will take it by force if you refuse. A robber demands your wallet and will take it by force if you refuse. In both cases money leaves you against your preference under threat of unpleasant consequences.

Almost everyone thinks these are different, and not merely because one is more polite. Explaining the difference is where political philosophy starts, and none of the explanations is easy.

The thing both cases involve

Coercion is not what distinguishes the cases, because both are coercive. That is worth stating plainly, since a good deal of loose talk treats state action as somehow non-coercive when it is well-intentioned. Every law is backed by a penalty, and every penalty is ultimately backed by people who will come and take you somewhere you do not wish to go. A political philosophy that starts by forgetting this has made its central question look easier than it is.

Coercion is not automatically wrong. Restraining someone about to push a stranger onto a track is coercion and needs no elaborate defence. What is true is that coercion requires justification in a way that leaving people alone does not, and the state is in the business of doing it constantly and at scale.

The thing only one case involves

The claim being made when a state acts is not merely that it will make you comply. It is that you ought to comply, that its saying so makes a difference to what you have reason to do, and that resisting it would be wrong rather than merely imprudent. The robber makes no such claim, which is why nobody feels they owe the robber anything.

An immediate distinction has to be drawn or the discussion becomes impossible. A state has authority in the descriptive sense when it does in fact make rules that are generally obeyed and maintains order. Every functioning state has that, including the worst ones. What is at issue in this article is not whether a state is obeyed but whether it is entitled to be, and the two can come apart in both directions.

So the difference between the tax authority and the robber is supposed to be that the first has this property and the second does not. Saying what confers it is the difficulty.

The last clause is the demanding one. Everyone agrees you should not commit murder, and you would have that duty in a state of anarchy. Political obligation is meant to be something extra: a duty to obey the law about which side of the road to drive on, arising from its being the law, on a matter where nothing but the state's having spoken makes one option better than the other. A theory that only delivers duties you would have anyway has not delivered political obligation.

Three things that are not one thing

These come apart, and confusing them produces arguments where both sides are right about different things.

Authority is a right held by the state. Legitimacy is what makes that right real rather than claimed. Political obligation is the corresponding duty on the subject. The traditional view treats them as strictly correlative, so that a legitimate state has authority and its subjects have obligations, all three standing or falling together.

That view has been challenged from both directions. Some argue that a state can be legitimate, in the sense of being morally permitted to coerce and to make rules, without its subjects thereby having a general duty to obey; permission to enforce is one thing, and a duty to comply is another. Others hold that people can have duties to support just institutions without those institutions having anything like a right to rule them.

A further distinction, pressed by A. John Simmons, cuts across all of this and is regularly missed. Showing that states in general are a good thing, that life without them is worse and that having one is defensible, is a justification of the state. Showing that this particular state has the right to rule these particular people is a claim about legitimacy, and it does not follow from the first. An institution can be an excellent idea and still have no standing over you, in the way that a well-run club is a fine thing and has no authority over people who never joined.

The answers on offer

Each of the standard answers to what confers legitimacy gets a full treatment later. Their shapes are worth having now, because each has one obvious virtue and one obvious problem.

Consent is the oldest answer and the most intuitive, since agreeing to something is the clearest way anyone acquires an obligation. The problem is that almost nobody has consented to their state. The intermediate tier examines the attempts to find a form of consent that people have actually given.

Benefit is the second answer: you have taken the advantages of a cooperative scheme, so you owe your share of its costs. The problem is that benefits can be pressed on people who never asked for them, and being handed something unrequested does not usually generate a debt.

A third answer drops the search for something the subject did and grounds the duty in a general requirement to support just institutions where they exist. The problem is that this seems to bind you equally to every just institution anywhere, which is not what political obligation was supposed to be.

The fourth answer changes the question. On Joseph Raz's account, an authority is legitimate over you when you would do better at complying with the reasons that already apply to you by following its directives than by acting on your own judgement. Traffic law is the model: you have reason not to crash, you will act on that reason more successfully by following a rule than by deciding each time, and the rule's authority consists in that service. The problem is that the account makes legitimacy piecemeal, since it holds over the domains where the state actually does know better and not elsewhere.

Next

This article has treated the state as a familiar thing whose right to command was in question. The next asks what a state is and what it is supposed to be doing, which brings the argument that we might do without one.