1 - Legitimacy and the Duty to Obey

Summary

In 1970, Robert Paul Wolff pronounced that “the fundamental problem of political philosophy [is] how the moral autonomy of the individual can be made compatible with the legitimate authority of the state.” The reconciliation proved impossible for Wolff because “the defining mark of the state is authority, the right to rule[, while] the primary obligation of man is autonomy, the refusal to be ruled.” The state, in Wolff's view, is necessarily illegitimate, and “political philosophy, as the study of that legitimate political authority which distinguishes civil society from the state of nature, is dead.” Although political philosophy has not died, it has not yet recovered from Wolff's assault.

Wolff and others have been able to persuade most of their attentive colleagues that the idea that citizens owe the state, even a just state, a duty of obedience – even only a provisional, nonabsolute, prima facie duty – has to be given up. Accordingly, one might say that the fundamental problem confronting political philosophy today is that of explaining how the state can be legitimate if there is no general duty to obey its laws. This is the problem that I will attack. What I hope to show is that we can make sense of the idea of a legitimate political authority without positing the existence of a general duty to obey the law.