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I am grateful to David Lefkowitz, Justin Tosi, and the participants in a MANCEPT workshop on authority and legitimacy for comments that helped me to improve an earlier draft of this paper.
To hold political authority is to have a right to rule, and those subject to the authority have an obligation to obey its directives. That is the core of the standard or traditional account of the relationship between authority and political obligation. To be sure, few philosophers, living or dead, would endorse this account without elaboration or qualification. Among other things, most would insist that the authority in question must be genuine or legitimate rather than merely apparent, that its directives do not exceed the authority's proper bounds, and that the obligation to obey is in some way defeasible rather than unconditionally binding. With such qualifications in mind, however, it has long been thought that there is a direct connection between the existence of political authority and a general obligation to obey its laws.
This has been the view, moreover, not only of those who maintain that there is a general obligation of obedience but also of those who do not. Anarchists have long denied that anyone has an obligation to obey any laws, of course, but they have done so because they reject all claims to political and legal authority. In recent decades, these political anarchists have been joined by others whose doubts about the claims of political authority stop short of calling for the abolition of the state. The most radical of these are the philosophical anarchists, such as Robert Paul Wolff and A. John Simmons, who deny the legitimacy of political authority and the existence of a general obligation to obey the law while being content to let the state remain in place.1 In Wolff's case the argument is that authority is incompatible with our fundamental moral duty of autonomy; in Simmons's, it is that all attempts to show how the citizens of even a reasonably just state have a general obligation to obey its laws have failed. Neither Wolff nor Simmons, however, nor their counterparts among the political anarchists, have questioned the connection between political authority and political obligation.2 That step has been left to...