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Authority, legitimacy, and justice
Two questions sit under everything political. Why obey? — what, if anything, makes the state’s power over its subjects rightful rather than merely effective. And who gets what? — what a just distribution of goods, opportunities and burdens would be. They are distinct: a regime might be legitimate yet rule unjustly, or rule justly yet hold its power by no right. Much of the field is the working-out of how the two relate.
The contract and the obligation to obey
The dominant modern answer to why obey grounds authority in agreement. If the state’s power rests on the consent of the governed, then in obeying I am bound by something I have, in some sense, authorized. The social contract tradition gives this its classic forms, and they diverge sharply. Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651) starts from a state of nature so insecure that rational agents would hand near-absolute power to a sovereign for the sake of peace. Locke (Two Treatises, 1689) starts from natural rights to life, liberty and property that the state exists to protect and may not violate, with a right of revolution when it does. Rousseau (The Social Contract, 1762) makes the contract constitute a collective body whose “general will” is sovereign, dissolving the tension between obeying and being free into self-rule.
The standing objection is that almost no one has actually consented to anything. The replies map the field: tacit consent (residence, use of public goods) — which critics from Hume onward find too thin to bind; hypothetical consent (what rational agents would agree to), which trades the force of an actual promise for the appeal of a fair procedure; and the abandonment of consent altogether for other grounds — fairness, democratic authorization, the natural duty to support just institutions. Philosophical anarchism presses the hole: if no account succeeds, there may be no general obligation to obey, and the state’s authority is a standing presumption rather than a proven right.
Rawls and the explosion of justice theory
For most of the twentieth century distributive justice was a minor topic; John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) made it the centre of the field. Rawls revived the contract as a device for justice rather than authority: imagine choosing the principles to govern society from behind a veil of ignorance, knowing nothing of your own place, talents or conception of the good. He argued that parties so placed would choose equal basic liberties, fair equality of opportunity, and the difference principle — inequalities are just only insofar as they benefit the least advantaged. The book reset the questions everyone else now answers.
The replies became the field’s most worked terrain. Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) answered from the libertarian right: justice is a matter of entitlement, not pattern — holdings are just if justly acquired and transferred, and any attempt to maintain a preferred distribution requires continuous interference with free exchange (“taxation is on a par with forced labour”). Ronald Dworkin recast equality as equality of resources, launching the luck-egalitarian line — neutralize the effects of brute luck, hold people responsible for genuine choices — later sharpened and contested by G. A. Cohen and others. Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum shifted the metric again to capabilities: what matters is the real freedom a person has to achieve valuable functionings, not the bundle of goods they hold. Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice (1983) denied there is one principle at all — different goods (money, office, healthcare, honour) belong to different spheres, each with its own distributive logic, and injustice is the invasion of one sphere by another. The disagreement is not resolved; it is the live structure of the subject.
Does legitimacy answer to justice?
The two questions rejoin in a dispute over their own relation. One camp holds that legitimacy is grounded in justice — a state’s right to rule depends on how nearly just it is. Another holds the two come apart: legitimacy is a matter of the right procedure, so a democratic decision can be legitimate, and binding, even when it is wrong. Rawls’s later work moved through this terrain. Political Liberalism (1993) confronted the fact that a free society is permanently divided among incompatible “comprehensive doctrines,” and sought legitimacy not in any one of them but in an overlapping consensus on political essentials and the discipline of public reason — justifying coercive law in terms all reasonable citizens can accept. Habermas’s discourse theory locates legitimacy instead in the procedure of free public deliberation: law is legitimate when it could meet the agreement of all affected in undistorted communication.
Against both stands the realist and Schmittian challenge. Carl Schmitt (The Concept of the Political, 1927; Political Theology, 1922) argued that the liberal faith in neutral procedure and rational consensus conceals the thing politics actually turns on — the decision, the friend–enemy distinction, the sovereign exception that no rule can contain. On this view the search for a procedure that launders power into legitimacy is an evasion of the conflict that is politics’ real ground. Whether legitimacy can be made to rest on reason and consent, or whether that rests in turn on a prior decision reason cannot reach, remains open.
See also: Liberty and the self · The one and the many · Political philosophy (the bundle)