Robert Paul Wolff's In Defense of Anarchism (Harper 1970, 1976) is a good book by a clear thinker and master expositor. Here is a first batch of interpretive and critical notes. I use double quotation marks when I am quoting an actual person such as Wolff. Single quotation marks are employed for scaring, sneering, and mentioning. The MP is punctilious to the point of pedantry about the use/mention distinction. Numerals in parentheses denote pages in Wollf's text. 'W' abbreviates 'Wolff.'
1. Overview. W's thesis is that "the concept of a de jure legitimate state" is "vacuous" and that "philosophical anarchism" is "the only reasonable political belief for an enlightened man." (19) W. proceeds by first explaining the concepts of authority and autonomy and then arguing that they are irreconcilable. The upshot is that the state lacks moral justification.
2. W. defines politics as "the exercise of the power of the state" and political philosophy as "the philosophy of the state." (3) "The state is a group of persons who have and exercise supreme authority within a given territory." (3) Distinctive of the state is "supreme authority" whether it be vested in one person or in a group of persons. (4)
3. To have authority is to have the right to command, and the right to be obeyed. (4) The power to compel compliance, however, is not the same as authority. As a matter of fact, states use and threaten the use of force in order to compel compliance with their rules and regulations. But that fact does not confer authority on them. Compare theft and taxation. The thief has no right to my money even if he has the power to take it. A duly constituted government, however, presumably does have a right to some of my money. It has authority over me. If I withhold the taxes I owe, I cheat the government. But no one will say that if I withhold money from a thief, I cheat him. (4)
The problem, of course, is to explain wherein consists the difference between these two cases. Whence derives the state's authority? Given that might does not make right, what is the source of the state's right to command and right to be obeyed? Why isn't taxation a form of theft?
4. It is one thing to claim authority, another to have it. (5) But there are two ways of having authority. If I claim authority over you, and you accept my claim, then there is a sense in which I do have authority over you. This is the descriptive (non-normative) sense of 'authority.' But there is also a normative sense of 'authority.' Suppose I claim authority over you, and you accept my claim; it does not follow that my claim to authority is justified. It does not follow that I possess authority in the normative sense. And what holds for me, holds for the state. A state whose claim to authority is acknowledged is not the same as a state whose authority is justified. This is an important point.
5. Correspondingly, there are non-normative (descriptive) and normative (prescriptive) concepts of the state. Descriptively, a state is "a group of persons that is acknowledged to have supreme authority within a territory. . . ." (5) Such states are de facto states and lie within the province of political science. Prescriptively, a state is "a group of persons who have the right to exercise supreme authority within a territory." (5) This is the notion of a de jure state. It falls within the province of political philosophy. Political philosophy is thus a normative enterprise: it is concerned with legitimate states and what constitutes their legitimacy. (5)
6. There are two construals of supreme (ultimate) authority in the normative sense, Rousseauean and Lockean. The first is that the state has ultimate authority over all matters that occur within its jurisdiction. The second is that the state has authority over only some such matters. Thus on the Lockean approach, the "supreme authority of the just state extends only to those matters which it is proper for a state to control." (6) The authority of the Lockean state is accordingly limited. One of the questions of political philosophy is that of the limit, if any, to the range of affairs over which a just state has authority.
7. If I command you to do something, and you do it, not because I have commanded it, but because you perceive the reasonableness or moral obligatoriness of the content of my command, then you are not strictly speaking obeying a command. My commanding is merely the occasion of your becoming aware of your duty, and my role might just as easily have been played by an admonishing friend or your own conscience. (6) Wolff's point is that, strictly speaking, it is not prescriptions or proscriptions that have authority; it is only persons who can be said to have or lack authority. "Thus authority resides in persons . . . by virtue of who they are and not by virtue of what they command." (6) Any duty to obey is a duty owed to a person or persons; strictly speaking, there is no duty to obey a prescription or proscription. There is no duty to obey the moral law.
8. It is a fact that people accede to claims of supreme authority. But ought they? Suppose the persons who make up the state order you into military uniform, and you, acceding to their authority, comply. W's question is whether the state's authority is justifiable. It exists, no doubt, and is backed up by force; but is one morally obliged to acquesce in it? "Under what conditions can a state (understood normatively) exist?" (8)
The "fundamental task of political philosophy" is to justify the supreme authority of the state which is tantamount to proving that "there can be forms of human community in which some men have a moral right to rule." (8)
9. Suppose the de facto political 'authorities' command all and only what, for independent reasons, one is morally required to do. Would that coincidence of the commanded and the morally required suffice to demonstrate the legitimacy, the de jure authority, of the political 'authorities'? It would not, on W's view. For W, it is a question of the right to command and the correlative obligation to obey a command. Where do some people (the political 'authorities') get the right to command other people? This is W's question, and it cannot be settled by appealing to what is the case as regards claims to authority and acknowledgements of authority. "Normative concepts . . . refer to what ought to be rather than to what is." (8) Thus the concept of normative supreme authority cannot be justified by adducing facts about existing states.
If you do what I tell you to do, it does not follow that you have obeyed me. The concept of obedience requires that you do as commanded, because you are commanded.
10. For W, it is possible that every belief in authority is wrong, that no person or group of persons has ever had the right to be obeyed. Indeed, W is entertaining the possibility that it is impossible for there to be justified authority. So his question could be framed as follows: How is justified authority (correlatively, obligatory obedience) possible?
To put it another way, how can the concept of a de jure or legitimate state be shown to apply to something? How can it be demonstrated that this concept is not vacuous? W's contention, of course, is that it is vacuous, and thus that no state is morally justified, which is just what the anarchist thesis amounts to. To see how W supports this contention requires separate posts.
11. Critical Remark. It is perhaps premature to begin launching a critique since I am still in process of trying understand W's overall argument. But already something smells fishy. He seems already to have things so rigged that it will be logically/conceptually impossible for there to be any moral justification of the state. Given #9 above, even if there were a complete coincidence of what is commanded by the people in power and what is morally required on independent grounds, that would not suffice as a justification. But then what could?