Political Authority and Legitimacy
This area asks whether and why the state may rightfully rule, command obedience, and use coercion, and what could make political power morally legitimate rather than mere domination.
Definition
Political authority is the (claimed) moral right of a state to issue binding directives and enforce them; legitimacy is the property by which the exercise of political power is morally justified, and political obligation is the corresponding duty of citizens to obey.
Scope
Covers theories of political authority and the duty to obey the law (political obligation), accounts of legitimacy grounded in consent, fairness, or natural duties, the social-contract tradition, and philosophical anarchism's denial that any state has genuine authority. Excludes empirical political science of regime stability.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- What, if anything, gives the state the right to rule?
- Do citizens have a general moral duty to obey the law, and what grounds it?
- Is consent necessary, sufficient, or even possible as a basis for authority?
- Can a state be legitimate even if no actual consent has been given?
- Is philosophical anarchism — the claim that no state is genuinely authoritative — defensible?
Key concepts
- authority
- legitimacy
- political obligation
- the state of nature
- tacit and express consent
- fair-play obligations
- the duty of autonomy
Key theories
- Social-contract authority
- Hobbes derives the authority of the sovereign from a covenant by which individuals, to escape the insecurity of the state of nature, authorize a common power; Locke grounds legitimate government in consent and the trust to protect natural rights, forfeited by tyranny.
- Philosophical anarchism
- Wolff argues that the duty of autonomy is incompatible with the state's claim to command obedience, so no state can possess legitimate authority, even if some states ought prudentially to be obeyed.
- Critique of consent and fair-play accounts
- Simmons examines the leading grounds for political obligation — consent, fair play, gratitude, and natural duty — and argues that none successfully establishes a general obligation binding ordinary citizens to their state.
History
Questions of why we should obey rulers are ancient, but the modern framing arises with the early-modern social-contract theorists Hobbes (1651), Locke (1689), and Rousseau (1762). In the 20th century the debate sharpened into the analytic problem of political obligation, with Wolff's defence of anarchism (1970) and Simmons's influential critique of standard justifications (1979).
Debates
- Does consent ground authority?
- Whether the authority of the state rests on actual, tacit, or hypothetical consent — and whether any version can bind those who never expressly agreed, as Simmons questions of the contract tradition.
- Authority vs. autonomy
- Whether the state's claim to a right to be obeyed is reconcilable with each person's duty of moral autonomy, which Wolff argues it is not.
Key figures
- Thomas Hobbes
- John Locke
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Robert Paul Wolff
- A. John Simmons
Related topics
Seminal works
- hobbes1651
- locke1689
- wolff1970
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between legitimacy and authority?
- Legitimacy is the justification of a state's right to hold and exercise power, while authority is more specifically its standing to issue directives that citizens have a duty to obey; a state might be legitimate in some respects without commanding full obligation.
- What is philosophical anarchism?
- It is the view that no existing state possesses genuine political authority and that citizens have no general moral duty to obey the law, though anarchists may still grant that obeying many laws is prudent or independently right.