Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

Chapter 2 Political authority

If someone were to ask how we govern ourselves today — under what arrangements do we live together in society — the answer must be that we are governed by states that wield unprecedented power to influence our lives. They not only provide us with basic protection against attack on our persons and our possessions, they also regiment us in countless ways, laying down the terms on which we may make our living, communicate with one another, travel to and fro, raise our children, and so on. At the same time they supply us with a huge range of benefits, from health care and education through to roads, houses, parks, museums, sports grounds, and the like. It would not be going too far to say that today we are creatures of the state. Not all states are equally successful in performing these functions, of course, but no one benefits from belonging to a failing state.

Looked at from the perspective of human history, this is a very recent phenomenon. Human societies have usually governed themselves on a much smaller scale. In tribal societies authority might rest in the hands of the village elders, who would meet to settle any disputes that arose among the members of the tribe, or interpret tribal law. When societies emerged on a larger scale, as in China under the Han dynasty or medieval Europe, they still lacked anything that deserved to be called a state. Although supreme authority rested in the hands of the king or the emperor, day-to-day governance was carried out by local lords and their officers. Their impact on people’s lives was also much more limited, since they neither attempted to regulate them so closely (except perhaps in matters of religion), nor of course did they attempt to provide most of the goods and services that modern states provide. Political authority was woven into the social fabric in such a way that its existence seemed relatively uncontroversial. The arguments that took place were about who in particular should wield it (by what right did kings rule?), and whether it should be divided between different bodies, for instance between kings and priests.

The emergence of the modern state, however, first in Western Europe, and then almost everywhere else, has meant that the problem of political authority has preoccupied political philosophers for the last 500 years. Here is an institution that claims the right to govern our lives in countless ways. What can justify that claim? Under what circumstances, if any, do states wield legitimate political authority? How far are we as ordinary citizens obliged to obey the laws they make and follow their other dictates? These very basic questions need to be resolved before we can move on in the following chapters to ask how best to constitute the state — what the form of government should be — and what limits should be set to its authority.

When we say that the state exercises political authority, what do we mean? Political authority has two sides to it. On the one side, people generally recognize it as authority, in other words as having the right to command them to behave in certain ways. When people obey the law, for instance, they usually do so because they think that the body that made the law has a right to do so, and they have a corresponding duty to comply. On the other side, people who refuse to obey are compelled to do so by the threat of sanctions — law-breakers are liable to be caught and punished. And these two aspects are complementary. Unless most people obeyed the law most of the time because they believed in its legitimacy, the system could not work: to begin with, there would need to be huge numbers of law-enforcement officers, and then the question would arise who should enforce the law on them. Equally, those who do keep the law out of a sense of obligation are encouraged to do so by knowing that people who break it are likely to be punished. I do not steal from my neighbour because I respect his right of property. I hope that he respects mine too, but I know that if he doesn’t I can call the police to get my property back. So people who comply with authority voluntarily know that they are protected from being taken advantage of by less scrupulous persons.

Political authority, then, combines authority proper with forced compliance. It is neither pure authority, like the authority of the wise man whose disciples follow his instructions without any compulsion, nor pure force, like the force exercised by the gunman who relieves you of your wallet, but a blend of the two. But the question remains, why do we need it? After all political authority, particularly when exercised by a body as powerful as the modern state, imposes a great many unwelcome requirements on us, some of which (like paying taxes) make us materially worse off, but others of which make us do things that we object to morally (like fighting in wars that we oppose). What reply can we give to the anarchist who says that societies can govern themselves perfectly well without political authority, and that the state is essentially a racket run for the benefit of those who hold positions of power?

I shall come back to anarchist alternatives to the state later in the chapter, but first I am going to defend political authority, as others have before me, by asking the reader to imagine life in society without it — with the police, the army, the legal system, the civil service, and the other branches of the state all taken away. What would happen then?

Perhaps the most famous thought-experiment along these lines can be found in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in 1651. Hobbes, as I mentioned in Chapter 1, had experienced the partial breakdown of political authority brought about by the English Civil War, and the picture he painted of life in its absence was unremittingly bleak. He described the ‘natural condition of mankind’ without political rule as one of ferocious competition for the necessities of life, leaving people in constant fear in case they should be robbed or attacked, and constantly inclined, therefore, to strike at others first. The result was summed up in a much-quoted passage:

It is sometimes said that Hobbes reaches this pessimistic conclusion because of a belief that people are naturally selfish or greedy, and will therefore try to grab as much for themselves as they can when unrestrained by political authority. But this misses Hobbes’s real point, which is that cooperation between people is impossible in the absence of trust, and that trust will be lacking where there is no superior power to enforce the law. Those things that Hobbes describes as missing in the ‘natural condition’ are above all things that require numbers of people to work together in the expectation that others will do their part, and in the absence of political authority it is not safe to have any such expectation. If I make an agreement with someone, why should I expect him to keep it, if there is no law to enforce the agreement? And even if he is inclined to keep the agreement, he may wonder the same about me, and decide that it is too risky to do so. In this situation, Hobbes argues, it is only prudent to assume the worst, and take every step you can to secure yourself against the threat of death; and the way to do that, in turn, is to amass as much power relative to other people as you can. At base it is fear of others, born of mistrust, that turns life without political authority into ‘a perpetuall warre of every man against his neighbour’.

Was Hobbes’s pessimism justified? His critics point out that if we look around us we can find ample evidence of people trusting one another, cooperating with one another, even helping each other with nothing expected in return, without any involvement by the state or any of its branches. A group of neighbours, for instance, may decide together to repair a derelict children’s playground, form a team, and divide up the work, each relying on the others to do their bit, without any legal agreement or other means of enforcement. Human nature is not as Hobbes portrayed it. But in a way this misses the point. Although Hobbes probably did have a rather low opinion of human nature (he was once caught out giving money to a beggar, and had to explain that he only did it to relieve his own discomfort at the sight of the beggar), his real point is that in the climate of fear that would follow the breakdown of authority, the kinder, more trusting, side of human nature would be obliterated. And from what we know of human behaviour when people are caught up in civil war and other situations in which their very survival is at stake, he seems to have been right.

We need political authority, then, because it gives us the security that allows us to trust other people, and in a climate of trust people are able to cooperate to produce all those benefits that Hobbes listed as signally lacking in the ‘natural condition’. But how can we create authority where it does not exist? Hobbes envisaged everyone gathering together and covenanting with one another to establish a sovereign who would rule them from that day forward; alternatively, they might submit themselves individually to a powerful man, a conquering general for instance. He thought it mattered little who had authority, so long as the authority was unrestricted and undivided. Here we may part company with him. But before looking more closely at how authority should be constituted, we should pause to see whether there is any other way to escape the ‘natural condition’. Despite all that Hobbes says, might social cooperation be possible in the absence of political authority?

_{3. Thomas Hobbes, defender of political authority.}

Anarchists believe that it is indeed possible, and although anarchist voices have always been in a small minority, we should listen to them: as political philosophers we are duty bound to put conventional wisdom to the test, and so we cannot take political authority for granted without exploring the alternatives to it. There are two different directions we might take here: anarchists themselves fall broadly into two camps. One points towards community, the other towards the market.

The communitarian alternative to political authority takes face-to-face communities as the building blocks that make trust and cooperation between people possible. In a small community where people interact with one another on a daily basis and everyone knows who is a member and who isn’t, it is comparatively easy to maintain social order. Anybody who attacks another person, takes their possessions, or refuses to perform his fair share of the community’s work, faces some obvious penalties. As news of his behaviour spreads, other people will reprimand him and may refuse to work with him in future. At community meetings he will be denounced and he may even be asked to leave altogether. All this can happen without the malefactor being forced to do anything or being formally punished — that is why we can describe this as an alternative to political authority rather than a form of it. One of the most important human motives is a desire to be accepted and respected by those around you, and in the setting of a small community this makes cooperation possible even if people are not saints.

Communitarian anarchists argue that, in a society made up of communities like this, cooperation will be possible on a much larger scale. Essentially communities will agree to exchange services with one another — they may specialize in producing different kinds of goods for instance — and they will collaborate on projects that need to be carried out on a larger scale, for instance, creating a transport system or a postal service. It is in each community’s interest to make these agreements, and the penalty for breaking them is that no one will be willing to cooperate with your community in the future if it proves to be untrustworthy. So once again there is no need for a central authority to tell people what to do, and no need to use coercive force to compel communities to cooperate — the system will effectively be self-policing.

What is wrong with this idyllic picture of life without the state? One major problem is that it relies on small, tight-knit communities as the basis for social order, and although in the past this might have been a reasonable assumption to make, it no longer is today. We live in societies that are highly mobile, both in the sense that people can move around physically quite easily, and in the sense that there is a ready supply of new people to collaborate with, and also, unfortunately, to take advantage of. The anarchist picture is not nonsense, but it works on the assumption that we will interact over time with the same group of people, so that the way we behave becomes common knowledge in the group. It also assumes that the possibility of being excluded from the group is a powerful deterrent to antisocial behaviour. But in a large, mobile society that assumption does not hold. We need, therefore, a legal system that will track down and punish people who injure others, and that allows us to make binding agreements with one another that carry a penalty if we default.

Cooperation between communities is also less straightforward than the anarchist picture supposes. For loyalty to your own community frequently goes along with a fairly intense distrust of others, and agreements may therefore collapse because we over here are not convinced that you over there are contributing your fair share to the project we are supposed to be working on together. And we may disagree about what fairness requires in the first place. Suppose we want to build a society-wide rail network in the absence of a central authority. What share of resources should each community contribute? Should it be so much per head, or should richer communities put in proportionally more? If my community is situated in a remote area that costs much more to connect to the network, should it alone cover the extra cost, or should that cost be shared equally by all communities? There are no easy answers to these questions, and no reason to think that it would be possible for many local communities to come to a voluntary agreement about them. The state, by contrast, can impose a solution: it can require each person or each community to contribute a certain amount, say through taxation.

Now let us consider the other anarchist alternative to political authority and the state, the one that relies on the economic market. This certainly goes with the grain of the modern world, in so far as the market has proved to be a formidable instrument for allowing people to work together in large numbers. It already supplies us with most of the goods and services we need and want. But could it replace the state?

Market anarchists — sometimes called libertarians — claim that we could contract and pay individually for the services that the state now provides, including crucially for personal protection. In the absence of the state, firms would offer to protect clients and their property, and this would include retrieving property that had been stolen, enforcing contracts, and obtaining compensation for personal injury. So if my neighbour steals something that is mine, instead of calling the (public) police, I would call my protective agency, and they would take action on my behalf against the troublesome neighbour.

But what if the neighbour disputes my claim and calls his agency, which may of course be different from mine? If the two agencies cannot agree, libertarians claim, they may refer the case to an arbitrator, who again would charge for her services. After all it is not in the interest of either agency to get into a fight. So there would be a primary market for protective services, and then a secondary market for arbitration services to deal with disputes — unless of course everyone chose to sign up with the same agency (but why would that happen?). And the other services that the state now provides would also be handed over to the market — people would take out health insurance, pay to have their children educated, pay to use toll roads, and so on.

Does this system really do away with political authority? The protective agencies would need to use force to protect their clients’ rights. If my neighbour does not hand back the property when it has been established that it rightfully belongs to me, then my agency will send round its heavies to retrieve it. But still, there is no authority proper, because my neighbour is not obliged to recognize my agency — he can always fight back — and I too can change agencies if I dislike the way mine is behaving. So this is genuinely an anarchist alternative to the state. But is it a good alternative?

It might look attractive if we thought that the various agencies would all agree to implement the same set of rules to govern property disputes and so forth, and would all consent to independent arbitration in case of dispute. But why should they do this? An agency might hope to win customers by promising to fight on their behalf no matter what — i.e. even if they appeared to be in the wrong by the standards that most people accepted. Once a few agencies like this enter the market, the others would have to respond by taking an equally aggressive line themselves. And this would mean that increasingly disputes would have to be settled by physical force, with the risk to ordinary people of being caught in the cross-fire. We would be slipping back into Hobbes’s condition of ‘Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man’, and in this condition the only rational decision for each person is to sign up with the agency that is likely to win the most fights. But the result would be to create a body with the power and authority to impose the same body of rules on everyone — in other words we would (inadvertently) have recreated the state.

There is another problem with relying on the market to carry out all the functions that states now perform. One of these functions is the provision of what are called ‘public goods’ — benefits that everyone enjoys and that no one can be excluded from enjoying. These come in many and varied forms — clean air and water, for example, defence against external aggression, access to roads, parks, cultural amenities, media of communication, and so on. These goods are created either by imposing restrictions on people — for example when governments require manufacturers to curb the release of toxic gases into the atmosphere — or by raising taxes and using the revenue to pay for public broadcasting, transport systems, environmental protection, and the like. Could these goods be provided through an economic market? A market operates on the basis that people pay for the goods and services they want to use, and the problem with public goods is precisely that they are provided for everyone whether they pay or not. Of course it is possible that people might contribute voluntarily if they saw the value of the good being provided: old churches that are costly to maintain rely to some extent on visitors who enjoy looking round the church putting money in the box by the door. But it is very tempting to free ride, and in the case of many public goods we may enjoy them almost without realizing it (we don’t think, as we get up in the morning, how lucky we are to have breathable air and protection against foreign invasion; we take these things for granted until something goes wrong). So it seems that we need political authority with the power to compel in order to ensure that these goods are provided.

There isn’t space here to consider all the ingenious arguments that libertarian anarchists have come up with to show how public goods could be provided through the market, or else by people banding together and agreeing to contribute to their production: in political philosophy there are always more arguments to make. But I hope I have said enough to suggest why neither communities nor markets — important as these are in many areas of human life — can replace political authority and its modern embodiment, the state.

_{4. How anarchists see political authority: Russian cartoon 1900. The text reads, clockwise from the top: we reign over you; we fool you; we eat for you; we shoot you; we rule you.}

Much as we may dislike the state when it regulates us, taxes us, conscripts us into its service, and impinges on our lives in many other ways, we could not live well without it. The real choice is not whether to have political authority or not, but what kind of authority to have, and what its limits should be. These are the subjects of the following chapters. But we have not yet quite finished with authority itself. There is still one crucial question that needs to be answered: why should I obey it, when it tells me to do things that I dislike or disapprove of? Political philosophers call this ‘the problem of political obligation’.

You might think the question has already been answered, by showing why we need to have political authority. But in fact there is still a gap between recognizing that the British government, say, has a right to make laws and impose taxes, and thinking that I personally am obliged to keep those laws and pay my tax bills. It is not as though my refusal is going to bring the government down, or seriously impede its ability to maintain social order. All states manage to survive a good deal of law-breaking and tax evasion. If I think solely about the consequences of my action, I may well conclude that more good will come from breaking the law — say preventing my local authority from demolishing a historic building by chaining myself to the gates to prevent the bulldozers getting through — or from using the money I would otherwise have paid in tax to support Oxfam. So why should I obey the law?

One reason, of course, is that I am likely to be punished if I don’t. But we are looking here for a more principled reason for obeying. Some political philosophers conclude that the problem is insoluble. I should obey the law, they say, only when there are independent reasons to do so, reasons that have nothing to do with the fact that the law emanates from a legitimate authority. But others have tried to provide positive solutions — too many, in fact, for all of them to be considered here. I shall look at just two, the first because it has historically been the most popular, the second because I believe it to be broadly correct.

The first solution claims that we are obliged to obey the law because we have agreed or consented to do so. The appeal of this idea is easy to see. Suppose I go along to my local soccer club and ask to join. When Saturday comes I turn up for the match, but instead of playing by the rules, I insist on picking up the ball and running with it. The club members would no doubt be highly indignant. By joining the club, they would say, I am agreeing to play football by the normal rules, whether or not I have signed an explicit agreement to that effect. My argument that the game is more fun if people are allowed to run with the ball would rightly be ridiculed. This is a football club, they would say: anyone who joins implicitly accepts the prevailing rules.

The difficulties begin, however, when we try to transfer this argument from the football club to the state. For generally speaking people do not choose to join states: they are required to obey them whether they like it or not. So in what sense do they give their consent? Hobbes argued that we choose to belong to the state because it is preferable to the state of nature where life, as we saw, is ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ and it does not matter how the state arises. Even if we submit to a conqueror at the point of a sword, we still consent to his authority, because we do so to escape a worse fate. But this stretches the idea of consent beyond recognition. What made the football club example compelling was the fact that I freely chose to join.

Later writers rejected Hobbes’s argument about obligation and consent, and tried to find something other than the mere fact of subjection to the state which could be used to indicate our consent to the law. John Locke, for example, pointed out in his Second Treatise of Government (1689) that we all accept benefits from the state, and our acceptance can be treated as a form of consent. In particular, since one of the chief functions of the state is to protect our property, when we acquire it by purchase or inheritance, say, we are also tacitly consenting to the state’s jurisdiction over that property, and therefore to its laws. This even applied, Locke thought, to someone who merely took lodgings for a week or travelled on the highway. However the problem again is that we really have little choice about accepting these benefits: we cannot live without property of some kind, even if it is only food and clothing; we cannot escape from the state without travelling the highway to the border. So it still seems to be stretching the idea of consent too far to say that anyone who enjoys state benefits is giving her consent, and obliging herself to obey the law.

More recently, some political philosophers have claimed that when we take part in elections, we agree to comply with the government that emerges and the laws it enacts. This looks more promising: we do at least have a free choice as to whether to vote or not, and there would be no point in holding elections unless people recognized the government that emerged as legitimate. But unfortunately there still seems to be a gap between voting and registering your consent. What if you deeply disagree with both parties, but vote because you think that one is slightly less bad than the other? Or what if you think that although you have in a sense consented to the overall package of policies that the winning party has announced in its manifesto, there are a few items that you find quite repugnant — and you had no chance to vote on these individually? Perhaps the voters’ consent can help explain why governments have legitimate authority, but not why individual citizens have an obligation to obey the law.

If we set the consent approach aside, a more promising way of showing that such an obligation exists involves an appeal to fairness or ‘fair play’. Again an example is the best way to convey the basic idea. Suppose a group of us are living in a house with a shared kitchen. Every week or so one of the residents tidies the kitchen and gives the pans and the surfaces a really thorough clean. Now everyone else has done the cleaning routine and it is my turn to spend half an hour scrubbing saucepans and mopping worktops. Why ought I to do this? I have benefited from the work the others have put in — I have enjoyed having a clean kitchen to cook my supper in — and so I ought to carry my share of the cost too, in this case the cost of a bit of manual labour. If I don’t take my turn, I’ll be taking advantage of the other residents, and that’s unfair. Notice that we don’t need to assume here that I have agreed or consented to take part in the cleaning rota: my obligation stems directly from the fact that I am the beneficiary of a practice that requires each person to contribute in turn.

How does this idea transfer to political obligation? Keeping the law, and complying with political authority more generally, means forgoing opportunities that would otherwise be available to you. Each of us would prefer to do exactly what he pleases, free from the burdens of respecting other people’s rights, paying taxes, and observing the traffic laws. Furthermore compliance is a benefit to others. When you pay your taxes, the rest of us benefit from the roads, schools, and hospitals that the taxes are used to pay for. When you stop at the red light, you make it safer for other motorists to cross on green. So it looks as though the person who breaks the law but benefits from the fact that other people are observing it is behaving unfairly in just the same way as the person who uses the kitchen but won’t take his turn at cleaning it.

Looks can be deceptive, however. There are at least two difficulties that have to be overcome if the fair play argument is going to justify political obligation. The first is that we have to show that the benefits the state provides really are benefits for everyone. What if the laws protect property, but only some people are property owners, for example? Or what if taxes are being used to fund art galleries and many people care nothing for art? The argument can work, however, so long as the whole package of benefits provided by the state makes everyone better off, and so long as the benefits are shared reasonably fairly among all the citizens whose compliance makes the system of authority possible. Perhaps I never visit art galleries, but I do use the football pitch provided free of charge in my local park.

Mention of fairness brings us to the second difficulty. In the kitchen example, I was taking it for granted that each person sharing the house made roughly equal use of the kitchen, and therefore would share the burden of cleaning equally. But what if one person only cooks there once a fortnight? Should she have to clean as often as the rest? Should we say that she does, because after all she could use the kitchen more often if she chose, and it is always available in case she needs it? Or should we try to adjust the contribution she is required to make in line with her actual usage? We might call these questions of substantive fairness, and it seems as though the fair play argument works best when it is applied to practices that are substantively fair, in the sense that the costs and benefits of the practice are shared fairly among the individual participants. But if we try to move from the simple kitchen example to society as a whole, we run into difficulties. What would a fair distribution of social costs and benefits look like, given that people have very different needs, abilities, preferences, and so forth? And if, as seems likely, the way that costs and benefits are actually distributed in societies today falls very far short of this ideal, can we still say that everyone has an obligation to obey the law in order to maintain a fair practice?

It seems, then, that my preferred solution to the problem of political obligation requires us to tackle the issue of social justice, which we will do in Chapter 5. But suppose for the moment that we are able to show that our society is sufficiently fair that its members do have an obligation to keep the law. Does this mean that they are never justified in breaking it? Or could political obligation be outweighed by other principles? Political philosophers, including Hobbes, have often argued that, without strict obedience to political authority, that authority will crumble into dust. But in practice it seems that states and other forms of political authority can survive and function effectively so long as people are generally (rather than universally) disposed to comply with them, and this opens the door to limited forms of disobedience, especially what has come to be called civil disobedience — illegal but non-violent forms of political protest whose purpose is to put pressure on government to change its policies. The argument for civil disobedience is that if a particular law is sufficiently unjust or oppressive, or if the state refuses to listen to the concerns of a minority when making its decisions, this can justify breaking the law if legal forms of protest prove to be ineffective. Political obligation, in other words, need not be binding on all occasions. We can have a general obligation to obey the law, and still be justified in acting illegally in extreme circumstances.

What difference does democracy make here? A common view is that civil disobedience might be an acceptable way of protesting against an authoritarian regime, but in a democratic state, with free speech and the right to protest peacefully, it cannot be justified — political obligation is more stringent here. But this implies that there is something special about democratic political authority that distinguishes it from other forms of political rule. What this special feature might be is the subject of the next chapter.