The College Fix

Political authority is the widely-accepted idea that the state has the right to our obedience, and we have a duty to obey its commands.

However University of Colorado Professor Michael Huemer argues in his latest book, The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey, that political authority is an illusion. This position is known as anarchism.

Huemer, a libertarian firebrand if there ever was one, recognizes – even relishes – the word’s shock value. Yet he makes it clear that though his political ideas are not mainstream, his basic moral commitments are.

In the preface, Huemer writes: “Is this a book of extremist ideology? Yes and no. Although I am an extremist, I have always striven to be a reasonable one. I reason on the basis of what seem to me common sense ethical judgments…. This is to say that although my conclusions are highly controversial, my premises are not.”

Thus, Huemer argues using analogies from cases where our ethical intuitions are clear. He is at pains to bring forward the intuition that coercion and violence are morally bad in all but the direst circumstances. The state, according to Huemer and to most political philosophers, is inherently coercive. This should make us suspicious of its claims on us.

Huemer spends much of the book sketching, in impressively elaborate detail, how all of the worthwhile functions of the state could be handed to private companies, home ownership associations and other voluntary organizations of property holding citizens. This includes not only things like healthcare, marriage, and infrastructure, but also things like policing and national security (though that would be a misnomer, if “nation” were taken to mean “state.”)

Anarchism of this type, in which there is private property and a capitalist order, is called anarcho-capitalism.

The book has many virtues. It is clear and accessible to the interested non-philosopher. Huemer has done his homework in sociology and economics, and uses his knowledge to take swipes at the sacred cows of both the left and the right. Also, his refutation of social contract theory is, to my mind, decisive. The self-proclaimed “reasonable extremist” is, at his best, extremely reasonable.

I also find ground for criticism.

First, many libertarians, like Robert Nozick, advocate a “night watchman” state that uses force to protect the libertarian rights of citizens but otherwise doesn’t meddle in their affairs. What objection could Huemer have to such minimal government?

Given that Huemer thinks we have moral reasons to respect the rights of others, and that we may use force to prevent rights from being violated, he seems committed to the conclusion that we’d have good reason to obey a well-functioning night watchman state. Yet such a state, for Huemer, would still lack political authority because he takes political authority to mean authority of the state because it is the state.

The trouble is that that makes the standards of political authority too narrow, and different from authority in other domains.

Plausibly, the reasons to obey parents, ship captains, doctors, and other authority figures boil down to the importance of good upbringing, health and the avoidance of maritime collisions with icebergs. We might tell a child or a subordinate “because I said so,” but few take this to be a complete explanation.

If political authority is anything like authority in all these other domains – and I can see no reason why it should not be – then it is in virtue of state providing goods such as security and order, not simply because “the state says so.” Thus, Huemer’s case seems ultimately motivated by the claim that the state causes more harm than good. Huemer never makes this claim explicitly, but it seems implicit throughout his writing.

For example in chapter 6,” The Psychology of Authority,” Huemer draws on the notorious Millgram and Stanford “prison guard” experiments to argue that if political authority did not exist, people would believe in it anyway. He is probably right. An implicit upshot of the chapter is that the state is prone to atrocities. The fact that advanced democratic nations commit fewer atrocities than totalitarian ones provides, he says, “small ground for self-congratulation.”

It wasn’t as if humans weren’t prone to atrocity before the state came along. Steven Pinker, in his book “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” describes violence declining with the rise of the state. Another book, “War Before Civilization” by Lawrence H. Keeley, documents the extent of pre-state violence. Sadly, against such a dismal background committing fewer atrocities may be ground for self-congratulation.

When we read Huemer’s relentless criticism of state coercion, we should keep in mind that not even Huemer’s alternative would be free of coercion, since he concedes the need for a system of criminal justice. Huemer envisions private arbitrators having the power to commit you to a life sentence in a forced-labor debtor’s prison, or even execute you. This is ironic, since those conclusions cut against the grain of the anti-coercion intuitions that he uses to motivate anarchism to begin with.

Freedom isn’t free, after all.

One final criticism is this. Huemer’s distaste for controversial moral theory leads him to avoid questions like, “why is it that coercion is so often wrong?” or even “what, exactly, is coercion?” This allows him to avoid being bogged down in certain controversies, but it also comes at the cost of making the discussion bottom out prematurely. Perhaps it is beyond the scope of this book, but ultimately I want an explanation of what coercion is and why it is usually wrong.

Compare Robert Paul Wolff. He, too, draws on intuitions in his book “In Defense of Anarchism,” but he also thinks his political ideas are grounded ultimately by Kantian notions of individual autonomy.

While I don’t agree with all of Huemer’s conclusions, I enjoyed reading The Problem of Political Authority. I most appreciate its clarity and comprehensive vision. It will be of interest to anyone who cares for political philosophy, or just plain hates government.

Fix contributor Spencer Case is a philosophy graduate student at the University of Colorado. He is a U.S. Army veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and an Egypt Fulbright alumnus.

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