Abstract
In this paper I respond to Bernd Krehoff’s article ‘Legitimate Political Authority and Sovereignty: Why States Cannot Be the Whole Story’. I criticize Krehoff’s use of Raz’s theory of authority to evaluate the legitimacy of our political institutions. Krehoff argues that states cannot (always) claim exclusive authority and therefore cannot possess exclusive legitimacy. Although I agree with his conclusion, I argue that the questions of legitimacy and (Razian) authority are distinct and that we need to focus more on the former in order to really support and defend Krehoff’s conclusions.
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Notes
See Krehoff (2008, n. 3) tells us he will not distinguish between justified and legitimate authority.
Krehoff seems aware of this, or at least I take it that this is what he is getting at in the rather obscure passage starting with ‘We can now begin to see …’ (Krehoff 2008).
I here simply assume (as I indeed believe) that consent theory is a coherent, if not entirely practical, proposal of how states could achieve legitimacy. Nothing said here depends on one’s views on the ongoing debate on whether legitimacy and the duty to obey the law are logical correlates. (That is, I do not mean to come down on the question whether a state could achieve legitimacy without its subjects having political obligations.)
Raz is not entirely clear on this topic. He endorses Rawls’ idea of a natural duty of justice on p. 66 of The Morality of Freedom (Raz 1986), but also suggests that ‘serving reasons’ might be what confers legitimacy. Yet that must be wrong as it renders unintelligible why a political authority can coerce, yet the cook (or the doctor from Krehoff’s example) cannot coerce me. For one, I understand Raz’s position to be this. What makes a particular political institution a legitimate one is that it actually achieves just results in accordance with the Rawlsian principle. The idea of authority as expressed by the NJT comes into play in the following way: only if a political institution has authority do we have an obligation to obey its laws instead of being free ourselves to go and achieve justice on our own. So only if an instititution has authority can it command the allegiance it needs to effectively exercise political power in accordance with the Rawlsian principle. In other words, perhaps it should be said that the best way to achieve de facto authority is to actually be an authority.
Elsewhere I have argued that whatever view on legitimacy we adopt (whether it be a voluntaristic theory of political obligation, a non-voluntaristic theory of political obligation, or a natural duty theory), we should dismantle the territorial states we currently live in. See my DPhil thesis, The Shapes of Legitimacy (Oxford: unpublished manuscript).
References
Krehoff, Bernd. 2008. Legitimate political authority and sovereignty: Why states cannot be the whole story. Res Publica 14. doi:10.1007/s11158-008-9073-z.
Raz, Joseph. 1986. The morality of freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgment
Thanks to Massimo Renzo for helpful suggestions.
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van der Vossen, B. On Legitimacy and Authority: A Response to Krehoff. Res Publica 14, 299–302 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-008-9074-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-008-9074-y