The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer

Debunking the Myths of Political Authority

States claim to have authority, and this authority is the basis for the individual’s duty to obey the state and the state’s right to coerce. Weber views the state as that authority which has the “monopoly over the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”[29] The legitimacy of the state is frequently presupposed. The Government of the day might lose legitimacy but the state rarely does. The question of where this legitimacy comes from has been explored by theorists across centuries. Michael Huemer’s The Problem of Political Authority addresses a slightly different question. He tries to answer the question of whether the state can be legitimate.

The book is divided into two conceptual sections that are further subdivided. Huemer devotes the first part of the book to the question of whether states can have special rights that ordinary persons lack and whether persons have special duties to the state that they do not have to others. The second part of the book is concerned with the consequences of recognizing that the state does not, in fact, have any authority. It addresses the question of whether society can function without a state.

Huemer manages to argue against political authority using a two-pronged attack, he first lays out his own argument and then launches critiques against the currently prevalent arguments for the existence of the state. He analyzes and critiques arguments from social contracts, arguments from democracy and arguments from equality among others. Huemer methodically demonstrates how all of these arguments fail to justify political authority.

Governments coerce people using force or the threat of force. For most people there exists strong moral and legal prohibitions against the use of force. An average citizen cannot use force in the ways that states can and do. If the state has the authority to use force, then, the rest of us, conversely, have a duty to obey. If the government has political authority, it can legitimately use coercion and force in situations and in ways that the rest of us would not be able to. For instance, most people would agree that a person would be justified in using force to prevent a murder, something government agents have been known to do. But no non-governmental agent would be considered justified in coercively extracting wealth from his neighbors, even for the admittedly noble cause of providing education to needy children. A person would never be justified in locking people he thought were guilty of crimes in his basement. Absent some special justification – we should conclude that states are not justified in doing this either. This special justification (or authority) is what Huemer tries to explore.

Huemer does not argue coercion is never justified. One example of justified coercion he gives is that of the sinking lifeboat; you need the aid of the other passengers to get rid of water, but they refuse to help. In this instance, you are justified in forcing them to bail water. This is not enough to justify the existence of government since the example only illustrates the acceptability of coercion, not authority. Huemer suggests that coercion by the state is only justified in the same situations that non-state actors could also coerce individuals.

Huemer proceeds to critique some of the commonly used justifications for the existence of the state. One of the most commonly used arguments for political obligation is social contract theory. The social contract argues that government arose from the voluntary agreement among individuals and is invested with the right to secure mutual protection and welfare and to regulate the relations among its members. Huemer agrees that the central idea of social contract theory is a good one—our interactions should be voluntary—however, he contends that “subjection to government is obviously not voluntary.”[30] The laws of the state are imposed on individuals whether one has consented or not, and there exist no reasonable means for opting out.

Some defenders of the social contract approach try to work around this objection by recasting it as a hypothetical contract: claiming that a rational person would consent, and hence the state’s right to coerce is legitimate. This, Huemer argues, does not work either. There is no good reason to think that people would agree to any particular set of commands. But even if there were, Huemer says, it still wouldn’t warrant the conclusion about the justification of coercion: “the mere unreasonableness of someone’s rejecting an arrangement does not typically render it morally permissible to coerce that person into accepting the arrangement”[31]. For instance, if I offered you millions of rupees for a book that's worth only a hundred, and you refused, I would not be justified in forcing you to accept. Here we see an example of Huemer’s approach—common sense and widely held moral beliefs about the wrongness of coercion are taken to be overridden because it is the state doing the coercing.

Huemer goes on to critique democratic theories of authority. He argues this through an analogy he calls the bar tab analogy. His thought experiment is simple, assume that you have gone out for drinks with a group of people. At the end of the night, when the bill needs to be paid, the group decides to deliberate on the question of how to pay the bill. After deliberation and a vote, the majority of people (everyone other than you) votes that you should pay for everyone. You feel it should be evenly split. Every member of the group has had an equal opportunity to be heard and everyone's vote counted equally. Are you now obligated to pay for everyone? Are the other members of the group entitled to compel you to pay through threats of violence? Most would argue no. The fairness of the process does not enable it to somehow sidestep all pre-existing ethical entitlements and restrictions. Individuals have a preexisting right not to be subjected to coercion. Deliberation, however fair and reasoned, does not invalidate that right.

After exploring consequentialist arguments and arguments from fairness, he investigates what our belief in authority has done to us historically. To do this, he cites examples like the infamous milgram experiment. Milgram finds ample evidence of the human willingness to obey authority figures even when told to do something that is clearly wrong, like shocking “learners” for giving incorrect answers.[32] The main lesson to take away from the experiment was that the belief in authority can result in a dangerous lack of accountability. Milgram draws the parallel to Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler, working alone, could perhaps have murdered a few dozen or even a few hundred people. What enabled him to become one of history’s greatest murderers was the socially recognized position of authority into which he maneuvered. himself and the unquestioning obedience rendered him by millions of German subjects. Just as none of Milgram’s subjects would have decided on their own to go out and electrocute anyone, very few Germans would have decided, on their own, to go out murdering Jews. Respect for authority was his key weapon.

Huemer closes the first half of his book with a chapter entitled “What if There Is No Authority?” In it he discusses how a stateless society could function. There are still laws and customs adhered to in the “free society.” Moral laws would still be abided by since people hold themselves to moral laws every day without needing to be reminded that there are political laws. There’s also no reason to think we’d have a world without consequences for unjust actions absent a state justice system. Personal rights, property rights, and community customs would still prevail. Only the nature of the legal system enforcing those rights and customs would look different. Huemer explains “... the circumstances and purposes that would justify coercion on the part of the state are just the circumstances and purposes that would justify coercion on the part of private agents.”[33]

The final argument to justify authority is that, without some such authority, society would be highly unstable and would likely descend into violent chaos. Huemer takes this objection seriously and devotes the second section of the book to arguing that the conditions of society would improve under anarcho-capitalism, not deteriorate. He shows how an anarchist society, one with no government whatsoever, could plausibly deal with individual security, criminal justice and dispute resolution, and war and societal defense. It would not be perfect, but governments are far from perfect; what matters is how effective anarchy would be in comparison to other feasible options.

In the stateless society Huemer envisages, each individual hires a ‘private protection agency’ (PPA) that protects his rights; and when rights come into conflict, these disputes are resolved by private arbitrators that the parties hire for the occasion. Such a system has, Huemer proposes, both non-instrumental and instrumental advantages over a state: ‘first, the anarchist system rests on voluntary cooperation and is therefore more just than a system that relies on coercion. Second, the anarchist system incorporates meaningful competition among providers of security, leading to higher quality and lower costs.’[34]

While the first part of his book, that argues that the state has no authority, is expertly argued the second section is more shaky. Start with the claim that the system Huemer envisages rests on voluntary cooperation rather than coercion. If this is meant to entail that the anarchic system does not rely on coercion, it is simply mistaken. Rights are normally coercively enforceable; and it certainly seems to be part of the arrangement Huemer sketches that PPAs coercively enforce the rights of their clients against those who have violated them. But if the PPAs are enforcing and protecting their client's’ rights by way of coercive threats, then the anarchic system too involves coercion. Perhaps Huemer’s thought isn’t that the anarchic system can do without coercion, but rather that it is also voluntary, and that the voluntary character of the anarchic system redeems its coercive aspects. By contrast, our relation to the state is non-voluntary, and thus coercion by the state cannot be redeemed in the same way.

Even if each agent stands in a voluntary relation to the PPA he has chosen. It doesn’t follow that coercion in the anarchic system is redeemed by consent or voluntary submission. To start, my PPA need not be the entity that coerces me. Normally, the entity that seeks to coerce is not my own PPA, but the PPA of the agent whose rights I have allegedly violated. And there is no reason to think that I stand in any voluntary relation to that PPA, and voluntariness thus has no bearing on the coercion to which I am subjected.

In Michael Huemer’s last chapter in The Problem of Political Authority, Huemer describes how we can get from our current society to his model of anarchism. He starts off by adding a caveat, saying that his claim is not that anarchism is inevitable but that it also isn’t impossible or even exceedingly improbable. Huemer’s main reason for thinking this is the trajectory of history. For most of human history, we’ve lived in aristocracy, feudalism, autocracy, monarchies, dictatorships and so on. But only a few hundreds of years ago this thing called democracy happened. And at the time few people thought it would work. The same could be said of anarchism under a democratic society. Most people in the world do not understand anarchism. To the extent that they do know about it, they are doubtful of its sustainability. Yet, in a matter of hundreds of years, democracy has overcome these same biases and become one of the most widely accepted political systems. This is certainly true in most prosperous countries that exist. Who is to suggest that more radical change cannot happen?

Huemer concludes his argument by addressing whether it is actually possible to reach a state of anarchy. He says:

“The evolution of values has been in the direction of greater respect for persons, a stronger presumption against violence and coercion, and a recognition of the equal moral status of all persons. This shift in values has driven the trend away from authoritarianism and towards liberal democracy. But these moral values are ultimately not consistent with government in any form. All governments are founded practically upon unjust coercion and philosophically on a claim by the state to a special moral status that sets it above all nongovernmental persons and groups. Equal respect for persons is not compatible with the doctrine of political authority.”[35]

While this argument is tempting, it is not flawless. Huemer himself says we can also point to certain ways that governments have only centralized in the past hundred years. An expanded bureaucracy and increased state power have made it easier for governments and states to impact and influence lives in ways that were not earlier possible. The growing surveillance state is just one such example.

Huemer rightly argues that if we had anarchism tomorrow things would be awful. Without alternative institutions in place and a culture that understands and respects the ideas of anarchism, it seems likely that anarchy would be synonymous with chaos. This change would have to be a gradual one. Huemer closes his book with some ideas about how we might get there from here. He advocates civil disobedience and is pessimistic about the feasibility of violent resistance.

The second half of the book is more prescriptive and, perhaps unsurprisingly, less persuasive. The problem is that Huemer argues for a pretty radical set of views, calling for the privatization of social security (and the “protection” industries as a whole), the law, and the military. This is not to say that his first section does not contain radical conclusions but it does not have radical premises. While Huemer effectively argues against the state he does not offer a reliable alternative for the protection of rights. He doesn’t effectively prove that the lacuna created by the absent state can be filled by private entities.

Huemer scrupulously reasons from widely shared moral premises to surprising conclusions. There's no question begging or obfuscation. Until the publication of Huemer’s book, anarchists and libertarians suffered from one major problem. Their problem was they often built their argument on intuitions that appealed to a small number of people. For instance, Ayn Rand grounded her arguments in the idea that agents ought to do what is in their own self-interest. Robert Nozick staked his belief in limited government on the concept of inviolable rights. These ideas do not sound immediately reasonable to most people, and have only served to paint anarchists as oddballs with a warped moral sense. Huemer’s book is the best argument yet that what separates anarchists from everyone else is not their attitude toward freedom, equality, fairness or even coercion. What distinguishes the two groups is their attitude to political authority. Anarchists reject it while others accept it. In sum, an impressive, easy to read, and excellent critique of political authority, coupled with a provocative defense of “anarcho-capitalism”.

Work Cited

1. Weber, Max. Politics As a Vocation. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1965. Print.

2. Huemer, Michael. The problem of political authority: an examination of the right to coerce and the duty to obey. Pg 35, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

3. McLeod, S. A. (2007). The Milgram experiment