4. How anarchists see political authority: Russian cartoon 1900. The text reads, clockwise from the top: we reign over you; we fool you; we eat for you; we shoot you; we rule you.
Much as we may dislike the state when it regulates us, taxes us, conscripts us into its service, and impinges on our lives in many other ways, we could not live well without it. The real choice is not whether to have political authority or not, but what kind of authority to have, and what its limits should be. These are the subjects of the following chapters. But we have not yet quite finished with authority itself. There is still one crucial question that needs to be answered: why should I obey it, when it tells me to do things that I dislike or disapprove of? Political philosophers call this ‘the problem of political obligation’.
You might think the question has already been answered, by showing why we need to have political authority. But in fact there is still a gap between recognizing that the British government, say, has a right to make laws and impose taxes, and thinking that I personally am obliged to keep those laws and pay my tax bills. It is not as though my refusal is going to bring the government down, or seriously impede its ability to maintain social order. All states manage to survive a good deal of law-breaking and tax evasion. If I think solely about the consequences of my action, I may well conclude that more good will come from breaking the law — say preventing my local authority from demolishing a historic building by chaining myself to the gates to prevent the bulldozers getting through — or from using the money I would otherwise have paid in tax to support Oxfam. So why should I obey the law?
One reason, of course, is that I am likely to be punished if I don’t. But we are looking here for a more principled reason for obeying. Some political philosophers conclude that the problem is insoluble. I should obey the law, they say, only when there are independent reasons to do so, reasons that have nothing to do with the fact that the law emanates from a legitimate authority. But others have tried to provide positive solutions — too many, in fact, for all of them to be considered here. I shall look at just two, the first because it has historically been the most popular, the second because I believe it to be broadly correct.
The first solution claims that we are obliged to obey the law because we have agreed or consented to do so. The appeal of this idea is easy to see. Suppose I go along to my local soccer club and ask to join. When Saturday comes I turn up for the match, but instead of playing by the rules, I insist on picking up the ball and running with it. The club members would no doubt be highly indignant. By joining the club, they would say, I am agreeing to play football by the normal rules, whether or not I have signed an explicit agreement to that effect. My argument that the game is more fun if people are allowed to run with the ball would rightly be ridiculed. This is a football club, they would say: anyone who joins implicitly accepts the prevailing rules.
The difficulties begin, however, when we try to transfer this argument from the football club to the state. For generally speaking people do not choose to join states: they are required to obey them whether they like it or not. So in what sense do they give their consent? Hobbes argued that we choose to belong to the state because it is preferable to the state of nature where life, as we saw, is ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ and it does not matter how the state arises. Even if we submit to a conqueror at the point of a sword, we still consent to his authority, because we do so to escape a worse fate. But this stretches the idea of consent beyond recognition. What made the football club example compelling was the fact that I freely chose to join.
Later writers rejected Hobbes’s argument about obligation and consent, and tried to find something other than the mere fact of subjection to the state which could be used to indicate our consent to the law. John Locke, for example, pointed out in his Second Treatise of Government (1689) that we all accept benefits from the state, and our acceptance can be treated as a form of consent. In particular, since one of the chief functions of the state is to protect our property, when we acquire it by purchase or inheritance, say, we are also tacitly consenting to the state’s jurisdiction over that property, and therefore to its laws. This even applied, Locke thought, to someone who merely took lodgings for a week or travelled on the highway. However the problem again is that we really have little choice about accepting these benefits: we cannot live without property of some kind, even if it is only food and clothing; we cannot escape from the state without travelling the highway to the border. So it still seems to be stretching the idea of consent too far to say that anyone who enjoys state benefits is giving her consent, and obliging herself to obey the law.
More recently, some political philosophers have claimed that when we take part in elections, we agree to comply with the government that emerges and the laws it enacts. This looks more promising: we do at least have a free choice as to whether to vote or not, and there would be no point in holding elections unless people recognized the government that emerged as legitimate. But unfortunately there still seems to be a gap between voting and registering your consent. What if you deeply disagree with both parties, but vote because you think that one is slightly less bad than the other? Or what if you think that although you have in a sense consented to the overall package of policies that the winning party has announced in its manifesto, there are a few items that you find quite repugnant — and you had no chance to vote on these individually? Perhaps the voters’ consent can help explain why governments have legitimate authority, but not why individual citizens have an obligation to obey the law.
If we set the consent approach aside, a more promising way of showing that such an obligation exists involves an appeal to fairness or ‘fair play’. Again an example is the best way to convey the basic idea. Suppose a group of us are living in a house with a shared kitchen. Every week or so one of the residents tidies the kitchen and gives the pans and the surfaces a really thorough clean. Now everyone else has done the cleaning routine and it is my turn to spend half an hour scrubbing saucepans and mopping worktops. Why ought I to do this? I have benefited from the work the others have put in — I have enjoyed having a clean kitchen to cook my supper in — and so I ought to carry my share of the cost too, in this case the cost of a bit of manual labour. If I don’t take my turn, I’ll be taking advantage of the other residents, and that’s unfair. Notice that we don’t need to assume here that I have agreed or consented to take part in the cleaning rota: my obligation stems directly from the fact that I am the beneficiary of a practice that requires each person to contribute in turn.
How does this idea transfer to political obligation? Keeping the law, and complying with political authority more generally, means forgoing opportunities that would otherwise be available to you. Each of us would prefer to do exactly what he pleases, free from the burdens of respecting other people’s rights, paying taxes, and observing the traffic laws. Furthermore compliance is a benefit to others. When you pay your taxes, the rest of us benefit from the roads, schools, and hospitals that the taxes are used to pay for. When you stop at the red light, you make it safer for other motorists to cross on green. So it looks as though the person who breaks the law but benefits from the fact that other people are observing it is behaving unfairly in just the same way as the person who uses the kitchen but won’t take his turn at cleaning it.
Looks can be deceptive, however. There are at least two difficulties that have to be overcome if the fair play argument is going to justify political obligation. The first is that we have to show that the benefits the state provides really are benefits for everyone. What if the laws protect property, but only some people are property owners, for example? Or what if taxes are being used to fund art galleries and many people care nothing for art? The argument can work, however, so long as the whole package of benefits provided by the state makes everyone better off, and so long as the benefits are shared reasonably fairly among all the citizens whose compliance makes the system of authority possible. Perhaps I never visit art galleries, but I do use the football pitch provided free of charge in my local park.