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Legitimate Political Authority and Sovereignty: Why States Cannot be the Whole Story

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Abstract

States are believed to be the paradigmatic instances of legitimate political authority. But is their prominence justified? The classic concept of state sovereignty predicts the danger of a fatal deadlock among conflicting authorities unless there is an ultimate authority within a given jurisdiction. This scenario is misguided because the notion of an ultimate authority is conceptually unclear. The exercise of authority is multidimensional and multiattributive, and to understand the relations among authorities we need to analyse this complexity into its different aspects. Instead of ultimate authorities we can have actors endowed with superior authority over others in one regard, but not necessarily in another. And this limited superiority is sufficient for resolving conflicts. There is no need for ultimate authorities. Having discarded the notion of sovereignty we can embrace a different conception of legitimate authority, one that is not interested in the pedigree of actors, but in their capacity to serve its subjects. If states wish to retain their central role in the domain of political authority, they will have to earn it.

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Notes

  1. For instance Wellman (1996), Christiano (2004), Estlund (2008).

  2. I use ‘legitimate’ and ‘justified’ interchangeably.

  3. Other reasons such as the cost of switching from one authority to another would, of course, also have to be considered before denying legitimacy to the state in this affair and assigning it to another institution.

  4. We can think of exceptions: the father of a newborn baby can be said to act irresponsibly when refusing to undergo medical treatment. But then the blame would be related to the moral obligation he has towards the newborn infant, not to some free-standing duty to preserve one’s health.

  5. http://www.oas.org/consejo/resolutions/res930.asp. Accessed 18 March 2008.

  6. The etymology of ‘sovereignty’ can be tracked back to the Latin word ‘superanus’ which roughly means ‘superior’ (Ilgen 2003, pp. 9–10).

  7. My arguments here draw heavily on the analysis of authority into different dimensions, and its implications for the theory of sovereignty, developed in an unpublished paper by Bas van der Vossen.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Bas van der Vossen, John Tasioulas, Fernando Muñoz Hernández, Massimo Renzo, and two anonymous referees for their generous and very helpful comments on previous versions of this article. I am grateful to Bjarke Viskum and, again, to Massimo Renzo for their invitation to a conference at Stirling University where I was able to present an early draft.

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Correspondence to Bernd Krehoff.

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Krehoff, B. Legitimate Political Authority and Sovereignty: Why States Cannot be the Whole Story. Res Publica 14, 283–297 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-008-9073-z

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