For another example of the shifting agenda of political philosophy, consider the value we attach today to personal choice. We think people should be free to choose their jobs, their partners, their religious beliefs, the clothes they wear, the music they listen to, and so on and so forth. It is important, we think, that each person should discover or invent the style of life that suits them best. But how much sense would this make in a society where most people, in order to stay alive, are bound to follow in their parents’ footsteps, with little choice of occupation, few entertainments, a common religion, and so on? Here other values become much more important. And this is how societies have been for most of human history, so it is hardly surprising that only in the last couple of centuries do we find political philosophies built around the supreme value of personal choice, such as John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which I shall discuss in Chapter 4.
In this book I have tried to strike a balance between the perennial questions of political philosophy and those that have appeared on its agenda only in the fairly recent past, such as the claims of women and cultural minorities discussed in Chapter 6. Striking this balance can be difficult: it is easy to get swept away by the political topics of the moment and lose sight of basic issues that underlie politics everywhere. One remedy is to travel back to Siena and Lorenzetti’s frescos and be reminded again that how political authority is constituted can make the difference between plenty and poverty, life and death. This is the starting point of the chapter that follows.
I have also tried to strike a balance between laying out the contrasting positions that have been taken up on these issues, and presenting arguments of my own. My aim is to explain what is at issue when anarchists argue with statists, democrats argue with elitists, liberals argue with authoritarians, nationalists argue with cosmopolitans, and so on, but it would be disingenuous to claim that I am surveying these debates from some entirely neutral, Olympian perspective. One cannot write about political philosophy without doing it as well. So although I have tried not to browbeat the reader into thinking that there is only one plausible answer to some of the most fiercely contested questions of our time, I have not attempted to disguise my sympathies either. Where you disagree with me, I hope you will find the reasons on your side of the argument fairly presented. Of course, I hope even more that you will be convinced by the reasons on my side.
Chapter 2
Political authority
If someone were to ask how we govern ourselves today — under what arrangements do we live together in society — the answer must be that we are governed by states that wield unprecedented power to influence our lives. They not only provide us with basic protection against attack on our persons and our possessions, they also regiment us in countless ways, laying down the terms on which we may make our living, communicate with one another, travel to and fro, raise our children, and so on. At the same time they supply us with a huge range of benefits, from health care and education through to roads, houses, parks, museums, sports grounds, and the like. It would not be going too far to say that today we are creatures of the state. Not all states are equally successful in performing these functions, of course, but no one benefits from belonging to a failing state.
Looked at from the perspective of human history, this is a very recent phenomenon. Human societies have usually governed themselves on a much smaller scale. In tribal societies authority might rest in the hands of the village elders, who would meet to settle any disputes that arose among the members of the tribe, or interpret tribal law. When societies emerged on a larger scale, as in China under the Han dynasty or medieval Europe, they still lacked anything that deserved to be called a state. Although supreme authority rested in the hands of the king or the emperor, day-to-day governance was carried out by local lords and their officers. Their impact on people’s lives was also much more limited, since they neither attempted to regulate them so closely (except perhaps in matters of religion), nor of course did they attempt to provide most of the goods and services that modern states provide. Political authority was woven into the social fabric in such a way that its existence seemed relatively uncontroversial. The arguments that took place were about who in particular should wield it (by what right did kings rule?), and whether it should be divided between different bodies, for instance between kings and priests.
The emergence of the modern state, however, first in Western Europe, and then almost everywhere else, has meant that the problem of political authority has preoccupied political philosophers for the last 500 years. Here is an institution that claims the right to govern our lives in countless ways. What can justify that claim? Under what circumstances, if any, do states wield legitimate political authority? How far are we as ordinary citizens obliged to obey the laws they make and follow their other dictates? These very basic questions need to be resolved before we can move on in the following chapters to ask how best to constitute the state — what the form of government should be — and what limits should be set to its authority.
When we say that the state exercises political authority, what do we mean? Political authority has two sides to it. On the one side, people generally recognize it as authority, in other words as having the right to command them to behave in certain ways. When people obey the law, for instance, they usually do so because they think that the body that made the law has a right to do so, and they have a corresponding duty to comply. On the other side, people who refuse to obey are compelled to do so by the threat of sanctions — law-breakers are liable to be caught and punished. And these two aspects are complementary. Unless most people obeyed the law most of the time because they believed in its legitimacy, the system could not work: to begin with, there would need to be huge numbers of law-enforcement officers, and then the question would arise who should enforce the law on them. Equally, those who do keep the law out of a sense of obligation are encouraged to do so by knowing that people who break it are likely to be punished. I do not steal from my neighbour because I respect his right of property. I hope that he respects mine too, but I know that if he doesn’t I can call the police to get my property back. So people who comply with authority voluntarily know that they are protected from being taken advantage of by less scrupulous persons.
Political authority, then, combines authority proper with forced compliance. It is neither pure authority, like the authority of the wise man whose disciples follow his instructions without any compulsion, nor pure force, like the force exercised by the gunman who relieves you of your wallet, but a blend of the two. But the question remains, why do we need it? After all political authority, particularly when exercised by a body as powerful as the modern state, imposes a great many unwelcome requirements on us, some of which (like paying taxes) make us materially worse off, but others of which make us do things that we object to morally (like fighting in wars that we oppose). What reply can we give to the anarchist who says that societies can govern themselves perfectly well without political authority, and that the state is essentially a racket run for the benefit of those who hold positions of power?