About the Author - Paul McLaughlin teaches in the Philosophy Institute, Pedagogical Academy of Zielona Gora, Poland.

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3. The concept of authority.

The logical conclusion of the liberal outlook, with its love of liberty and suspicion of anything that opposes it, might seem to be an anarchism of some kind.[28] However, as Waldron writes, ‘liberal theorists have always held that something like the modern state, with its familiar institutions of law and representative government, can be made legitimate [after the event?[29]]. They reject… the anarchist view that freedom is vindicated only in the absence of state authority’.[30] Indeed, this is precisely what defines liberalism as a political philosophy, a philosophy which assumes or argues for the legitimacy of political authority.[31] The question of legitimacy is surely the most fundamental question in political philosophy. Rousseau, for one, is aware of this when he writes: ‘I mean to inquire if, in the civil order, there can be any sure and legitimate rule of administration, men being taken as they are and laws as they might be’.[32] It is not enough to assume legitimacy in the case of an institution which – through war and ‘democide’ – brought about the deaths of more than 200 million people in the previous century alone.[33] Pushed beyond mere assumption to present some argument for State-legitimacy, liberals tend to rely on either (1) pragmatic reasoning (the State derives legitimate authority from the fact that it works) or (2) social contract theory (the State derives legitimate authority from an original agreement among the individuals who established it). We will explore social contract theory momentarily. Let’s begin with pragmatism.

(1) The pragmatic account is dominant academically and beyond. It consists of the following basic proposition: The State-ordered society works better than the stateless society. This proposition begs many questions. First and foremost, how does the pragmatist know this? A pragmatic evaluation presumably rests on more or less contemporary empirical evidence of the alternatives that it is assessing. Such an evaluation is possible in the case of, say, an assessment of State-forms, such as liberal-democratic versus communist. In the case of a fundamental assessment of the State as opposed to an anarchic society, on the other hand, proper pragmatic evaluation is impossible. The State is so pervasive in the contemporary world that there is simply no satisfactory empirical evidence of an anarchic society. To claim the superiority of the State-ordered society, then, is not strictly a pragmatic judgment; in fact, it could be termed absolutist and dogmatic

A more common, watered-down form of the ‘pragmatic’ account insists that it is utopian to imagine that a society without the authoritative institutions of the State would be ‘perfect’. Firstly, no anarchist – even the most ‘utopian’ – suggests that an anarchist society would be perfect and free of social ills. Secondly, the anarchist can respond that dystopianism is no more rational than utopianism. The imaginative assertion that a stateless society would be Hobbesian or warlike is the conclusion of those who believe in human crookedness: that we need to be held in check lest our ‘sinful’ nature run riot. (Von Mises is a good example here: ‘Anarchism misunderstands the real nature of man. It would be practicable only in a world of angels and saints’ – as opposed to a world of crooked humans, one assumes.[34]) Wolff notes accordingly that ‘Many political philosophers have portrayed the state as a necessary evil forced upon men by their own inability to abide by the principles of morality’.This view often goes hand-in-hand with a common argument from fear: while the present may be bad, the unknown future could be even worse; or, as the proverb has it, better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. This, too, is often combined with an argument from tradition: the world has (supposedly) always been this way, so why try to change it. Wolff puts this as follows: ‘The fact that something has always been done in a certain way strikes most men as a perfectly adequate reason for doing it that way again’.[35] This general dystopian outlook, founded on degrees of pessimism, misanthropy, historical myopia, and conservatism, can hardly be considered rational; it certainly isn’t morally compelling.

Anarchists need not assume either innate goodness or original sin; they need neither be dramatically utopian nor dystopian. From the point of view of moral neutrality, the essential purpose is to create a moral environment. There is no reason to assume that this environment is achieved within the borders of the State. Contrary to statist dystopianism, in fact, anarchists argue that the alternative to the State could hardly be any worse, bearing in mind, for example, (at the intuitive level) the above statistics and (more argumentatively) the fact that a stateless society would lack the apparatus of mass killing (a standing army with high-investment military technology, etc.). That is to say, anarchists challenge the very notion that the State works - though not along strict pragmatic lines, since the anarchist obviously lacks the comparable evidence for pragmatic evaluation as well

Some anarchists still enter into what might be called pragmatic debate from the historical perspective. They present historical evidence to support the claim that anarchy works – that is, works better than the State-ordered society. The vast accumulation of the relevant evidence, all too common in anarchist literature, results in endless and, perhaps, fruitless dispute over, for instance, the achievements of the Spanish Revolution, what or who caused its eventual failure, and so forth. The problem with this approach may be that it depends on its own argument from tradition: anarchy has been achieved before and therefore can be achieved again, perhaps on a larger scale. Frankly, it is not apparent that such arguments carry much weight. Simply put, the past has no necessary bearing on the future. Even if history presented no evidence of successful anarchist experiment, that would not prove that anarchy is practically impossible. Beyond historical evidence, evidence can be drawn from the success of various contemporary social experiments; given the condition of contemporaneity, this evidence might seem to provide the basis for proper pragmatic evaluation. However, the obvious doubt arises over the issue of relative scale.

The basic line of anarchist criticism is usually overwhelmed by discussion of the superiority of the liberal democratic State-form. Rummel, then, argues that democratic regimes are less violent – less democidal and less prone to war - than authoritarian regimes. He frames this entire concept with his ‘power principle’, that is, ‘power kills, absolute power kills absolutely’. His mass of statistical evidence apparently supports his contention. After all, in the twentieth century democratic regimes killed only 6,386,000 (2,016,000 by genocide, 4,370,000 by war) of the estimated 203,219,000 total number killed by states.[36] Rummel concludes: ‘The problem is power. The solution is democracy’.[37] That in itself is not clear. Democracy may reduce democide and war (and we have no need to dispute this), but perhaps only the disappearance of these phenomena should be considered a solution.[38] Perhaps democracy is the best State-form. But perhaps over 6 million deaths is still unacceptable. Perhaps greater freedom is the solution, as Rummel infers – but greater freedom than the State could permit or facilitate in any form. At any rate, Rummel’s is obviously a lesser of two evils argument; perhaps this is ethically insufficient (not least when over 6 million lives are in question), as anarchists argue.

(2) We turn now to social contract theory, the classical liberal method for demonstrating State-legitimacy. That is not to say that all of the major liberal theorists engage in social contract theory. Mill, most notably, writes: ‘[(a)] society is not founded on a contract, and… [(b)] no useful purpose is answered by inventing a contract in order to deduce social obligations from it’. (Mill’s problem is that his justification for ‘political power’, to the extent that he offers one, seems to be that it offers protection against ‘social power’; in other words, a concrete and, at times, literally tyrannic institution, the State, is justified in some form by the nebulous existence of potentially ‘tyrannic’ elements such as ‘the prevailing opinion and feeling’.) [39] Mill’s comment actually points toward two purposes for contract theory. (a) The first we might categorize as genetic: the attempt to explain the origin of political society as such, particular political societies, or particular governments. (b) The second (only suggested by Mill) can be termed ethico-political: the attempt to determine ethical standards by which to judge political institutions. Related to this distinction between purposes is a distinction regarding the status of the theory. (i) It may be considered factual (that is, based on historical evidence); but (ii) it is sometimes considered hypothetical (or abstract). The factual status is best suited to the genetic function; the best way to explain the origin of something is clearly to demonstrate how it actually originated, not how it might have originated under certain hypothetical conditions. The hypothetical status, on the other hand, is asserted by those with ethico-politico purposes; historical fact is apparently of little use here. To what degree, then, do these two forms of contract theory justify political authority; or, what is the same, to what degree do they contribute to fundamental political philosophy?

According to the genetic social contract doctrine, discrete and free individuals chose, at a particular historical point, to sacrifice some of their natural freedom in order to create an authoritative body, the State, which might offer some kind of security against interference by others, including organs of the State itself. (Therefore, security had to be secured against that which was instituted in order to secure security.) The genetic social contract theorist affirms that the State, with more or less limited authority, is justified by its actual consensual origin. Locke explains: ‘Men being… by nature all free, equal, and independent, no man can be put out of this estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent. The only way whereby anyone divests himself of his natural liberty and puts on the [legitimate] bonds of civil society is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater security against any that are not of it’. The obvious objection to the genetic account is to say that it is not factual – is, in other words, to question its status. A response might be that it doesn’t require factual status, not because such a status is undesirable, but because it is unrealistic given the antiquity of the institution. Locke momentarily leans this way, noting that ‘Government is everywhere antecedent to records’. However, he evidently does seek to support his theory with historical evidence or to claim factual status for it. Hence: ‘He must show a strange inclination to deny evident matter of fact… that the beginning of Rome and Venice were by the uniting together of several men free and independent one of another, amongst whom there was no natural superiority or subjection’. [40]

Locke therefore proffers a ‘true’ account of the origin of political authority in the light of which this authority is seen to be legitimate. Critics deny the truth of this theory, finding other theories such as conquest theory – essentially the theory that political authority is a mystification of certain social power which derived from force - more convincing (having greater evidential support), and also less likely to vindicate the State’s authority. Other critics, assuming the ‘truth’ of the contract theory for the sake of argument, deny that it confers permanent authority anyway. They ask: ‘how could this agreement bind… successors who were not party to it? [And yet] all states claim authority over the lives of their subjects’ children’.[41] Locke rejects this point (‘there is no tie upon [a child] by his father being a subject of this kingdom; nor is he bound up, by any compact of his ancestors’[42]), though his rejection is unconvincing. A final criticism here is that the social contract, supposedly premised on the agreement of rational agents, reflects a fair degree of stupidity. To give up the freedom of the state of nature for the sake of the security of the State, which comes to represent a danger greater than could possibly have existed in the natural condition, hardly strikes us as rational. In Miller’s words: ‘In creating a state, men create an institution that is far more dangerous to them than the power of other men taken singly’. (This is not a superficial or flippant point, as the statistics above illustrate.) Miller quotes the following words of Locke (directed at Hobbes, though they can be redirected at Locke himself):

This is to think that Men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what Mischiefs may be done them by Pole-Cats, or Foxes, but are content, nay think it Safety, to be devoured by Lions.[43]

Waldron describes the transition from the genetic approach (no longer possessing any credibility for all its notorious weaknesses) to the ethico-political approach. He states: ‘As Kant and Rawls have pointed out, we need not be embarrassed by the fact that no such contract ever took place. It is still a useful test to apply to a constitution or a set of laws. For if we conclude, even hypothetically, that our laws or our constitution would not have commanded the agreement of all those who are constrained by them, we will have discovered a significant dissonance between our political arrangements and the fundamental (pre-contract) notion of respect for each individual – a dissonance that ought to be of concern to liberal philosophers’.[44] Rawls himself thinks of the transition involved as carrying ‘to a higher level of abstraction the familiar theory of the social contract as found, say, in Locke, Rousseau, and Kant’. Thus, rather than accept the factual status of the theory as understood by Locke at least, Rawls seeks to develop it along abstract, hypothetical lines. Furthermore, he stresses the difference in purpose: ‘we are not to think [genetically] of the original contract as one to enter a particular society or to set up a particular form of government. Rather, the guiding idea is that the principles of justice for the basic structure of society are the object of the original agreement [reached in an ‘original position’ that ‘is not… an actual historical state of affairs’, but ‘a purely hypothetical situation’]. They are the principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests [a classical liberal assumption about human nature] would accept in an initial position of equality as defining the fundamental [ethical] terms of their association’.[45]

This approach appears reasonable enough: we conceive of the social contract as a means of testing the ethical validity of particular socio-political arrangements and institutions. Needless to say, the ethical principles used basically emanate from the shared ethical notions, even ‘intuitions’, of a particular culture with its particular sociopolitical arrangements and institutions. Therefore, the philosophically developed principles are hardly likely to challenge those arrangements and institutions in any fundamental or critical sense; they are hardly likely, for example, to challenge the legitimacy of the State, a body so bound up in our traditional ‘ethical’ thought that a philosophically sophisticated account of our shared intuitions could only reinforce it. Thus Rawls’ contract doctrine fails to meet the demands of political philosophy proper. Whatever its value may be, it cannot rise above the level of what Wolff calls ‘casuistical politics’, a ‘branch of ethics’ that deals with ‘moral questions which arise in regard to [de facto] states’, but never undertakes ‘the fundamental task of political philosophy’, which is to demonstrate the possibility of the de jure state, the State which possesses legitimate authority.[46] Genetic social contract theory attempted this; it constituted political philosophy. However, it failed, and the possibility remains, as anarchists suspect, that the ‘fundamental task’ simply cannot be achieved.

Either (a) genetically, where the social contract is a fantasy, an invention, or (b) ethico-politically, where, at best, the social contract is of minimal politico-philosophical value, social contract theory fails to convince us that the State – in its monumental power - is a legitimate institution. The task remains for political philosophers to justify political authority, but it seems that liberals, with (1) pragmatic argument or (2) social contract theory, are incapable of doing so. Their faith in the State is exactly that: irrational. Waldron, then, is surely wrong when he states that liberalism is heir to the Enlightenment’s critico-rational approach to sociopolitical matters – its ‘impatience with tradition, mystery, awe, and superstition as the basis of order, and [its] determination to make authority answer at the tribunal of reason and convince us that it is entitled to respect’.[47] Wolff, by contrast, may be correct when he writes that ‘philosophical anarchism would seem to be the only reasonable political belief for an enlightened man’.[48]

[28] Anarchism is principally skepticism toward authority. It isn’t necessarily anti-authoritarian (meaning opposed to all authority) since it can admit, for instance, qualified degrees of parental authority and authority in matters of belief. Nevertheless, anarchists reject the State and claims to legitimate political authority. Authority is understood here as a sub-category of social power (many other elements of which anarchists also question); social power itself is a sub-category of power, which non-human animals and non-animal phenomena in the natural world can be said to possess. Authority, then, is something social: it is exercised among human beings. (‘Authority over oneself’ is generally thought meaningless, and we don’t speak of authority within other animal species.) It is also claimed (by those who exercise it) and recognized (by those who obey it) as a right. Anarchism questions this right in all instances and denies it in the case of political authority. That is, while anarchism recognizes de facto political authority, it denies de jure political authority.

[29] There is a suggestion of this kind of – ideological – thinking in Rawls. He seeks to demonstrate that his theory ‘constitutes the most appropriate moral basis for a democratic society’ – that is, a dubious ethical rationale for something not too distant, fundamentally, from the existing sociopolitical order [A Theory of Justice, p. viii; emphasis added]. Rawls’ method – the move from ethical notions to ethical concepts or principles to ethical evaluation of social institutions – is itself questionable from this perspective, given that the theory is simply a philosophically sophisticated formulation of existing notions. This method is inherently uncritical and conservative.

[30] op. cit., §5; emphasis in original. Von Mises states this more strongly: ‘Liberalism is not anarchism, nor has it anything whatsoever to do with anarchism’ [Liberalism: The Classical Tradition, Chapter I, §7]. Anarchists share this opinion.

[31] We appear to follow Robert Paul Wolff here (notwithstanding serious reservations about the metaphysicality of his book). He writes: ‘Politics is the exercise of the power of the state, or the attempt to influence that exercise. Political philosophy is therefore, strictly speaking, the philosophy of the state’. Furthermore: ‘the fundamental task of political philosophy is to provide a deduction of the concept of the state’ [In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1976), pp. 3, 8]. These definitions are important as far as our definition of liberalism as a political philosophy is concerned. Anarchism is nevertheless conceivable as a political philosophy, in the classical sense of politics (see The Murray Bookchin Reader, Chapter 8); however, for no better reason than convenience, it is more helpful to think of it as a social philosophy to the extent that it is generally conceived (in the manner of Wolff) as being ‘anti-political’ – that is, opposed to political authority as such.

[32] The Social Contract, p. 181.

[33] Rudolf J. Rummel’s estimate (for the period 1900-1980 for war and 1900-1987 for ‘democide’) is 203,219,000 deaths (34,021,000 war dead; 169,198,000 democide victims). ‘Democide’ Rummel defines as ‘The murder of any person or people by a government [‘state’ would make more sense], including genocide, politicide, and mass murder’. [See Death by Government: Democide and Mass Murder in the Twentieth Century (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1994), Tables 1.6, 2.1.] Factor in more recent deaths in Angola, Burundi, Congo, Liberia, Somalia, Guatemala, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iraq, etc., and the figure becomes even more frightening. More speculatively, Rummel estimates the pre-twentieth century democide figure (from 30 B.C. at the twentieth century rate) at 625,716,000. In sixteen of the more infamous cases, his somewhat less speculative figure totals 133,147,000. [See ibid., Table 3.1.] By no means do such statistics suggest that the the legitimacy of the State can be assumed. The inevitable response, though, is that to focus on State-caused deaths is to forget the capacity of states to save lives (through health care, say) or to improve the quality of lives (through education, say). In the first place, such ‘positive’ functions of the State are not classical liberal concerns; liberals may have relatively little right to claim credit for them. In any event, none of these functions spare the State from our criticism – any more than a murderer (a term Rummel is willing to apply to states) is to be forgiven and commended for being, at the same time, a good doctor or a good teacher. It could be argued, further, that these ‘positive’ functions could be left to less ‘murderous’ social bodies than the State.

[34] Liberalism: The Classical Tradition, Chapter I, §7; emphasis added.

[35] In Defense of Anarchism, pp. 70, 6-7.

[36] Death by Government, Table 1.6. See also the previous note. This figure must be considered an absolute low given a number of factors, such as Rummel’s designation of ‘democratic’ status and a certain obfuscation of cases like the Vietnam War. Table 11.1 makes America’s role in that war seem minimal. Nevertheless, this has no bearing on the argument that follows.

[37] From the on-line version of the Preface to Death by Government [at http://www2.hawaii.edu/powerkills].

[38] Rummel does say that a theoretical consequence of global democracy would be an absence of war. For this, however, he relies on his most spurious statistical analysis, according to which there wasn’t a single democracy versus democracy war in the period 1816-1991 [Death by Government, Table 1.1]. Rummel’s debate with Ted Galen Carpenter is instructive on this issue [see the web-site referred to in the previous note].

[39] On Liberty, pp. 143, 73.

[40] The Second Treatise of Government, pp. 309-10, 312; emphasis added.

[41] David Miller, Anarchism (London: Dent, 1984), p. 6.

[42] The Second Treatise of Government, p. 322.

[43] Anarchism, p. 6.

[44] op. cit., §5; emphasis added.

[45] A Theory of Justice, pp. 11-12.

[46] In Defense of Anarchism, pp. 11, 8.

[47] op. cit., §3.

[48] In Defense of Anarchism, p. 19.

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