RICHARD DAGGER

PHILOSOPHICAL ANARCHISM AND ITS FALLACIES: A

REVIEW ESSAY

Two books appeared in the early 1970s that were to have a lasting
impact on political philosophy. One of them was John Rawls’s A
Theory of Justice,1 a magisterial book of nearly 600 pages that
now seems to have signaled the revival of political philosophy in
the grand manner. The other book, a slight volume of fewer than
90 pages, was quite different in its aims, yet every bit as ambi-
tious as Rawls’s. When Rawls set out to “carry to a higher order
of abstraction the traditional theory of the social contract” in order
to develop a “systematic account of justice that is superior . . . to
the dominant utilitarianism of the tradition,” he demonstrated great
confidence in the capacity of political philosophy.2 With the second
book, however, Robert Paul Wolff’s In Defense of Anarchism, the
aim was to show what political philosophy cannot do – namely,
reconcile the demands of political authority with those of personal
autonomy. The “just state,” Wolff concluded, “must be consigned
[to] the category of the round square, the married bachelor, and
the unsensed sense-datum.”3 Rawls gave us “the original position”
and “the difference principle,” but Wolff’s legacy is “philosophical
anarchism.”
The philosophical anarchist, according to Wolff’s account, is
far different from the bomb-throwing anarchists of lore and the
window-smashing, anti-World Trade Organization anarchists of
recent days. Except, perhaps, for the “Question Authority” bumper
stickers on their cars, there is nothing in the philosophical anarch-

1 Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1971); now available in a revised edition (Harvard University Press, 1999).

2 Ibid., p. viii.
3 Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 71.

Law and Philosophy 19: 391–406, 2000.

© 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
392 RICHARD DAGGER

ists’ appearance or actions to distinguish them from conventional,

law-abiding citizens. The difference lies in their respective attitudes
to authority and law. The philosophical anarchist and the conven-
tional citizen both will obey the law in most circumstances, but they
will obey it for different reasons. Conventional citizens believe that
they have a moral duty or obligation to obey, but the philosophical
anarchist rejects this belief and obeys simply because it is usually
prudent or convenient to do so. States and legal systems are good
to have around, in the philosophical anarchist’s view, as long as
we do not sacrifice our moral autonomy – which Wolff defines as
“submission to laws which one has made for oneself”4 – to them.
The philosophical anarchist “may do what another tells him, but
not because he has been told to do it.”5 “All authority is equally
illegitimate,” then, even if all authorities are “not therefore equally
worthy or unworthy of support. . . . ”6
It would be too much to claim that Wolff’s case for philosoph-
ical anarchism has been as influential as Rawls’s theory of justice
as fairness, but there is no doubt that Wolff’s short book has cast
a long shadow. One indication is the number of serious political
philosophers who have either embraced or come close to embracing
philosophical anarchism. Another sign is the appearance of works
that have attempted to refute this new form of anarchism, from
Jeffrey Reiman’s early reply to Wolff to the book that is the principal
concern of this essay: William Edmundson’s recent and welcome
defense of political authority against the anarchical tendencies he
perceives in contemporary legal and political philosophy.7 These
tendencies are manifest, Professor Edmundson claims, in “our anti-

4 Ibid., p. 14.
5 Ibid., p. 14; Wolff’s emphasis.
6 Ibid., p. 19.
7 Edmundson, Three Anarchical Fallacies: An Essay on Political Authority

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); further references to this book

will appear in parentheses in the text. Jeffrey Reiman, In Defense of Political
Philosophy: A Reply to Robert Paul Wolff’s “In Defense of Anarchism” (New
York: Harper & Row, 1972). See also Chaim Gans, Philosophical Anarchism and
Political Disobedience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and, for
a collection of essays on both sides of the question, John T. Sanders and Jan
Narveson, eds., For and Against the State: New Philosophical Readings (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996).
 PHILOSOPHICAL ANARCHISM AND ITS FALLACIES 393

state Zeitgeist” and “a fundamental distrust of state power” (p. 1;

Edmundson’s emphasis); and they are worrisome because a “demo-
cratic state can only be vitiated by popular doubts about its right to
exist, and a weakened state is to that extent less able to do what
only it can do, for example, protect the weak and meek against
the strong and loud” (p. 2). Edmundson’s intention, then, is “to
reinforce . . . [the] conviction that legitimate political authority is
possible and that living in a just state is a worthy ideal” (pp. 1–2).
“Reinforce” is perhaps not the appropriate word, for Edmundson’s
strategy is to take the battle to the anarchists and would-be anarchists
who have been attacking political authority philosophically. Rather
than presenting arguments that directly defend political authority,
in other words, he attempts to undermine the arguments against it.
His efforts are largely successful, in my view, but not completely
so. Moreover, his indirect defense requires, as Edmundson admits,
the supplement of a straightforward argument on behalf of political
authority. Before turning to these points, however, it is necessary
to explain why we should join Edmundson in taking the anarchical
tendency of much recent political philosophy as a serious concern.

In 1998, the same year in which Three Anarchical Fallacies

appeared, the University of California Press provided perhaps the
best evidence of Wolff’s legacy by publishing a third edition of In
Defense of Anarchism.8 To be sure, the new publication may testify
more to the book’s ability to provoke than its power to persuade.
When first published, as Wolff points out in the preface to the new
edition, the book “received a great deal of attention for a philosoph-
ical essay, virtually all of it negative. Every single reviewer – and
8 Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism, 3rd edn. (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1998). Unfortunately, neither Wolff nor the
publisher corrected the typographical and other errors of the previous editions.
For instance, Wolff places Locke’s defense of majority rule “at the very outset
of his Second Treatise of Civil Government” (p. 43, all editions), even though it
appears in Chapter 8 (§§95 and 96), and Rousseau’s statement that “the general
will is always right” is attributed to Book I, Chapter 3 of the Social Contract
(p. 55, all editions) rather than, correctly, to Book II, Chapter 3.
394 RICHARD DAGGER

there were many – said that the argument of the book was fatally
flawed.”9 Wolff remains convinced of the rightness of his views,
however. Indeed, he confesses that “a number of warm, appreciative
letters from right-wing libertarians” gave him “greater pause . . . than
all of the highly technical counter-arguments in the philosophical
journals.”10 Whether his readers were won over to philosophical
anarchism or not, it is clear that there have been a great many of
them, with “well over a hundred thousand copies in English” sold of
the first two editions and translations into Swedish, Italian, German,
and French. “Clearly,” Wolff remarks, “I had struck a nerve.”11
Nor was this nerve found only in right-wing libertarians. After
Wolff, the currency of philosophical anarchism probably owes most
to A. John Simmons, who has developed his own, less sweeping
version of the doctrine over the last twenty years in a series
of important books and essays, none of which marks him as a
right-wing libertarian.12 Simmons’s philosophical anarchism is less
sweeping than Wolff’s because Simmons denies the existence, but
not the possibility, of a legitimate state. In his terms, Wolff’s argu-
ment is a priori – the authority that states claim is necessarily
inconsistent with moral autonomy, so no state can be legitimate – but
Simmons’s is a posteriori. That is, nothing “in the definition of the
state precludes its legitimacy”; the problem is that no existing states
have met, or even seem likely to meet, the standards of legitimacy.13
For a voluntarist, as Simmons is, those standards hold that a state
is legitimate only when it is a truly voluntary association consti-
tuted by the agreement of its members. His a posteriori anarchism
thus takes this form: “Because I subscribe to political voluntarism,
. . . and because I believe no actual states satisfy the requirements of

9 In Defense of Anarchism, 3rd edn., p. v.

10 Ibid., p. viii.
11 Ibid., p. xii.
12 See, inter alia, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1979); On the Edge of Anarchy: Locke, Consent, and
the Limits of Society (Princeton University Press, 1993), esp. chap. 8; “Philosoph-
ical Anarchism,” in Sanders and Narveson, eds., For and Against the State; and
“Justification and Legitimacy,” Ethics 109 (July 1999): 739–771.
13 Simmons, “Philosophical Anarchism,” p. 21.
 PHILOSOPHICAL ANARCHISM AND ITS FALLACIES 395

this voluntarism, I also believe that no existing states are legitimate

(simpliciter).”14
The anarchical tendency is evident, moreover, among many
political philosophers who stop short of philosophical anarchism,
whether in Simmons’s or Wolff’s form. Without denying the
authority or the legitimacy of the state, these philosophers have
either rejected or expressed grave doubts about the claim that there is
a general obligation to obey the laws. As Leslie Green has claimed,
and as Edmundson notes, there is now “a significant coalescence of
opinion” within the liberal tradition that there is no such general
obligation, not even on the part of the citizens of a just state.15
Rather than a “consensus of wild-eyed cranks huddled in tar-paper
shacks in Montana,” as Edmundson puts it, this coalescence of
opinion emerges from “eminent professors at places like Oxford,
Virginia, Michigan, Columbia, and Toronto” (pp. 31–32).16 These
“eminent professors” may not all be anarchists, but their skepticism
with regard to political obligation is nevertheless “anarchical” in
Edmundson’s sense of the word: “tending to undermine confidence
in the legitimacy of the state” (p. 2).
This anarchical tendency also manifests itself, finally, in the
writings of those who encourage us to accept political authority
as both necessary and desirable while regarding it with suspi-
cion and distrust. Richard Flathman gives forceful expression to
this view in his Reflections of a Would-Be Anarchist.17 As a self-
described “willful” or “strong-voluntarist” liberal, Flathman takes
“self-enactment” or “self-making” as his ideal. The good life may
take many forms as long as it is not a form imposed on the indi-
14 Simmons, “Justification and Legitimacy,” p. 769.
15 Green, “Who Believes in Political Obligation?,” in Sanders and Narveson,
eds., For and Against the State, p. 1; quoted in Edmundson, p. 31.
16 In addition to Green’s essay, see his The Authority of the State (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1988) and, inter alia, M. B. E. Smith, “Is There a Prima Facie
Obligation to Obey the Law?,” Yale Law Journal 82 (1973): 950–976; Joseph
Raz, “The Obligation to Obey the Law,” in his The Authority of Law (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1979); and Rolf Sartorius, “Political Authority and Polit-
ical Obligation,” Virginia Law Review 67 (1981): 3–17. For a useful collection of
essays on this topic, see William A. Edmundson, ed., The Duty to Obey the Law:
Selected Philosophical Readings (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).
17 Flathman, Reflections of a Would-Be Anarchist: Ideals and Institutions of

Liberalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

396 RICHARD DAGGER

vidual – unless, perhaps, the individual imposes it upon himself

or herself through “the arts of self-making. . . . ”18 For the willful
liberal, then, the “human goods are individuality, distinctiveness,
and singularity, and the freedom to pursue and enact them. Human
beings are diminished by homogeneity, harmed by conformity and
unnecessary restrictions on freedom.”19 No matter how necessary,
just, or democratic it may be, political authority always poses a
threat to individuality, distinctiveness, and singularity. The willful
liberal will thus be one who is caught in – and seeks to engender
in others – “a nervous combination of grudging acceptance and
pervasive suspicion of government and politics.”20
Edmundson is right, in sum, to call our attention to the “antistate
Zeitgeist.”21 There are indeed anarchists among us, even if they are
“philosophical” or “would-be” in their anarchism. But is he also
right when he says that these “eminent professors” are wrong? Does
he succeed, that is, in exposing fallacies in the reasoning of those
whose arguments tend “to undermine confidence in the legitimacy
of the state”?

II

The three anarchical fallacies of Edmundson’s title involve the rela-

tionship of law to, respectively, legitimacy, coercion, and morality.
In each case, the purported fallacy follows from a mistaken assump-
tion or belief: in the first case, that a state is legitimate only if
its subjects have a duty to obey its laws; in the second, that law
is necessarily coercive; and in the third, that there is an “inner
sphere” of morality that “the law may not enter” (p. 3). To each
of these “fallacies” Edmundson devotes three chapters of close and
scrupulous analysis. This analysis will not convince every reader
that he has indeed exposed three widespread fallacies – for reasons
given in section III below, I doubt that he succeeds in the first case
18 Ibid., p. 15.
19 Ibid., p. 132.
20 Ibid., p. 80.
21 In the United States this “antistate Zeitgeist” has been remarkably long lived,

as Garry Wills demonstrates in A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust

of Government (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).
 PHILOSOPHICAL ANARCHISM AND ITS FALLACIES 397

– but the subtlety of Edmundson’s arguments and the richness of

his insights are nonetheless remarkable. Agree with him or not,
anyone concerned with political authority, political obligation, and
the relationship of law to morality will profit from a reading of Three
Anarchical Fallacies.
But one will have to read as carefully as Edmundson writes.
The book abounds with helpful examples, including several drawn
from legal cases, but hardly a word is wasted in exposition as argu-
ment follows argument. After beginning Chapter 1 with two para-
graphs on Wolff’s challenge to political philosophy, for instance,
Edmundson turns immediately to the first purported fallacy, which
he analyzes by way of the following “inconsistent triad” (p. 8):
1. A state is legitimate only if it claims to impose and, in fact, does
impose on its subjects a general, at least prima facie, duty to
obey its laws.
2. There is no general, even prima facie, duty to obey the laws of
a state, not even those of a just state.
3. Legitimate states are not only possible, but actual.
This triad is inconsistent because “the truth of any pair of the three
[propositions] entails the falsity of the third” (p. 8). For the philo-
sophical anarchists, propositions one and two are true, so three must
be false. Those who resist the anarchists’ conclusion usually affirm
propositions one and three by denying two. To make their case for
the legitimacy of the state, however, they have to provide grounds for
believing that there is a duty, at least prima facie, to obey the laws of
at least a just state; which means that they must defend a theory of
political obligation against the objections of Wolff, Simmons, and
the other “eminent professors” who have concluded that proposition
two is true.
Edmundson nowhere denies that such a theory has been or may
be devised, but he takes the objections against such theories to
be powerful enough to lead him to look for a different way of
supporting the legitimacy of the state. Hence he turns his attention
from the second to the first proposition. If “the worry about political
obligation has not gone away after over two millennia of treatment,”
as he says (p. 70), then perhaps the best way to defend the legit-
imacy of political authority, or the right to rule, is to divorce it from
its subjects’ duty to obey its laws. But the result is not so much a
398 RICHARD DAGGER

rejection as a modification of proposition one – a modification that

leads to a set of propositions that Edmundson takes to be both true
and consistent (p. 48; Edmundson’s emphasis):
1. A state is legitimate only if it claims to impose on its subjects
a general, at least prima facie, duty to obey its laws and its
subjects have a general prima facie duty not to interfere with
their enforcement.
2. There may be no general, even prima facie, duty to obey the laws
of a state, not even those of a just state; but there is a general
prima facie duty not to interfere with the administration of the
laws of a just state.
3. Legitimate states are not only possible, but actual.
The success of this modification, and the “consistent triad” it
makes possible, rests on Edmundson’s claim that “the duty to obey
the law and the duty not to interfere with the administration of the
law are quite different” (p. 49). The truth of this claim rests, in turn,
on the distinction he draws between laws and administrative prerog-
atives. These prerogatives “occupy one end of a spectrum that has
at its opposite end laws of the most general scope. They typically
represent an effort by an official to affect the immediate conduct of
an individual on a particular occasion, rather than an effort of an
institution to affect the conduct of classes of people throughout an
indefinite futurity” (pp. 49–50). There may be no general obligation
to obey the traffic laws, for example, but there is definitely a general
(albeit defeasible) duty not to resist traffic cops. The state may have
to make general claims about the duty-imposing force of its laws,
but its legitimacy requires only that its subjects have a duty not to
interfere with the enforcement of those laws. The anarchists commit
a fallacy, then, when they conclude from the (supposed) failure of
theories of political obligation that no state is legitimate.
The second “anarchical fallacy” Edmundson identifies is less a
case of faulty reasoning than of the unwarranted presumption that
law is coercive. This presumption, which “we all more or less take
for granted” (p. 73), tends toward anarchy because what “we regard
as coercive we regard as prima facie illegitimate; . . . what is not
coercive, . . . is presumed to be in order” (p. 73). To defeat this
second “fallacy,” then, Edmundson must demonstrate that law is not,
except in extraordinary circumstances, coercive.
 PHILOSOPHICAL ANARCHISM AND ITS FALLACIES 399

Edmundson says in his Introduction that Three Anarchical Falla-

cies “is largely devoted to the task of clearing conceptual under-
brush” (p. 3), and nowhere is that underbrush thicker and more
tangled than where it surrounds the concept of coercion. If the
conceptual analysis is hard going, however, the argument here
is straightforward. Following Alan Wertheimer, Edmundson takes
coercion to be a “two-prong” concept, with the first prong involving
choice and the second wrongfulness. Hence (p. 79),
A coerces B to ψ if and only if (1) A’s proposal creates a choice situation for B
such that B has no reasonable alternative but to R and (2) it is wrong for A to make
such a proposal to B.

From this point, Edmundson deploys a series of examples that lead

to the conclusion that there is nothing inherently wrongful in the
requirements law imposes on those subject to it. He also defends
this “thoroughly moralized” (p. 94) analysis of coercion against
those who advance “nonmoralized” analyses in which A’s proposal
to B may be coercive even if it is not wrong for A to make such
a proposal. Here his strategy is to show that these “purportedly
nonmoralized analyses rely covertly on moral notions . . . ” (p. 123).
There is no denying the moral element in coercion, then, and the
presumption that “law is coercive” requires one to prove that legal
requirements are necessarily wrongful. But legal requirements are
not necessarily wrongful, so we must reject the presumption and the
anarchical tendency it betrays.
The third, or “inner sphere of privacy,” fallacy is again a matter
of an unwarranted presumption. In this case the presumption is that
morality consists of two spheres: an outer sphere comprising wrongs
that are properly subject to law and an inner sphere comprising
wrongs that are not. As Edmundson observes, this inner sphere
is frequently associated with privacy: “The view that there are
some moral wrongs that the law may not properly right is tacitly
and sometimes explicitly assumed by many participants in the
unrelenting debate about the right of privacy” (p. 127).
Against this two-sphere conception of morality, Edmundson
argues for what he, adopting a term from Joel Feinberg, calls a
“perfect coincidence” view in which “what morality requires and
what law may permissibly require” are one and the same (p. 128).
The argument turns on Edmundson’s claim that all genuine moral
400 RICHARD DAGGER

requirements permit some form of social enforcement, even if the

enforcement is as mild as a sharp word or a disapproving glance.
All moral requirements are social, for “there is no sense to be made
of the idea of a private moral requirement” (p. 132; Edmundson’s
emphasis). Legal enforcement is a form of social enforcement of
morality – indeed, the law exists “to eliminate the hazards of a
regime of private enforcement . . . by presuming largely to monopo-
lize compulsory means . . . ” (p. 157) – so the question is whether
there is anything distinctive about the law that makes it unfit for
use in the enforcement of some moral requirements. The answer
is that legal enforcement need not be harsher or more stigmatizing
than other forms of social enforcement of morality, so there is a
perfect coincidence of “what morality requires and what law may
permissibly require.”
As “may permissibly” indicates, Edmundson is not advocating
that we bring the full force of the law to bear on every breach of
morality. What is permissible is not always prudent, and “one can
consistently hold that morality in principle permits the law to add its
sanction to each and every one that morality already carries, while
denying that it would be wise, efficient, or desirable for there to
be any more than a minimal, ‘night watchman’ state . . . ” (p. 132).
Even so, there is a danger in this “perfect coincidence” view. If
we may properly use the law to enforce morality, then we may
expect to face “the politically very bloody debate about what is
and is not morally wrong” (p. 176). But this is a danger that must
be braved. There is no inner sphere of morality that is off limits
to law. Morality and prudence, and not privacy, must be the stan-
dards: “when specific issues of morals legislation arise, the perfect
coincidence view requires those taking a liberal position to face the
potentially awkward dilemma of having either to ‘bite the bullet’ by
explicitly contradicting popular moral notions, or to admit that their
opposition to legal enforcement is based only on grounds of policy,
not of moral principle” (p. 133).

III

I turn from exposition to criticism with the hope that the preceding
section conveys something of the significance as well as the
 PHILOSOPHICAL ANARCHISM AND ITS FALLACIES 401

substance of Professor Edmundson’s important book. That exposi-

tion only hints at the intricacy and ingenuity of his arguments,
however, and space will not allow me to give them the critical
attention they deserve. I shall simply say, then, that I agree with
Edmundson on the third of his “anarchical fallacies” – there is, as
he says, no inner sphere of morality that law may not enter – and
limit my criticism to his remarks on the legitimacy of the state and
the coerciveness of law.
With regard to the latter, Edmundson’s concern is clearly
warranted. The presumption that law is coercive is prevalent, and
it does tend to place “upon [law’s] defenders a burden of persua-
sion, which, even if carried, leaves what has to be defended under
a cloud” (p. 73).22 This presumption rests on a one-dimensional
conception of law that ignores the ways in which laws can not
only impose duties but also confer powers.23 But one can reject
this one-dimensional conception without accepting Edmundson’s
“moralized” account of coercion. To be sure, there is something
attractive about a conception of coercion that allows us to count
robbery, but not the condign punishment of the robber, as coer-
cion. But there are also cases in which it seems helpful to use
‘coercion’ in a morally neutral fashion. For example, when Garrett
Hardin recommends “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the
majority of the people affected” as the solution to “the tragedy of the
commons,” he clearly believes that there are times when coercion
is not wrongful.24 But on Edmundson’s account, Hardin must be
referring to something other than coercion, for coercion is neces-
sarily wrong. Perhaps, but it seems odd to hold that Hardin’s use
of ‘coercion’ is incorrect when it has seemed perfectly intelligible

22 As it should, according to Flathman: “Bentham . . . rightly insisted (following

the excellent example of Hobbes in at least this one respect) that every law and
more particularly every enforcement of law restricts liberties and hence requires
justification” (Reflections of a Would-Be Anarchist, p. 116).
23 H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), esp.

pp. 26–48. As Hart says (p. 28), “The power thus conferred on individuals to
mould their legal relations with others by contracts, wills, marriages, &c., is one
of the great contributions of law to social life; and it is a feature of law obscured
by representing all law as a matter of orders backed by threats.”
24 Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (December 13, 1968):

1243–1248.
402 RICHARD DAGGER

to so many readers. At the least, Edmundson owes us a concept to

take the place of coercion – compulsion? restraint? – when we want
to speak of cases in which (1) A’s proposal to B creates a choice
situation for B such that B has no reasonable alternative but to R and
(2) it is right or permissible for A to make such a proposal to B.
More serious difficulties arise in the case of Edmundson’s
defense of the legitimacy of political authority. Again, my quarrel
is not with his conclusion but with the way in which he reaches
it. There are two problems here. First, Edmundson relies on a
distinction that cannot bear the weight he assigns it; and second,
his argument is at best only partly successful as a response to
philosophical anarchism.
Edmundson’s argument for the legitimacy of the state relies on
the distinction he draws between laws and administrative preroga-
tives, for “there is a general prima facie duty not to resist the latter
even though there may be no general prima facie duty to obey the
former” (p. 50). The problem here is not with the distinction so much
as with Edmundson’s use of it. That is, we may grant that adminis-
trative prerogatives are different from laws without accepting the
claim that the former impose duties and the latter do (or may) not.
Why, after all, do we have a duty not to resist (or “to interfere with”
[p. 53]) the administrative prerogatives of a just state? Edmundson’s
answer is that administrative prerogatives are, in contrast to the
abstractness and generality of laws, particular and direct. To use his
example (p. 50), if it is hard to understand how one has even a prima
facie duty to obey the law that says we must stop at the legendary
stop sign in the middle of the desert, it is not at all hard to see that
we have a duty to stop for the traffic cop in the middle of the desert.
But why do we have a duty to stop for the traffic cop? Setting aside
humanitarian considerations, there is no duty to stop for anyone else
who signals us to stop in similar circumstances. If there is a duty
to obey traffic cops, judges, and others who exercise administrative
prerogatives, it is because they are officers of the law. The duty to
obey, or not to resist, administrative prerogatives, in short, derives
from the duty to obey the law – otherwise there is no reason to obey
a traffic cop that would not apply equally to anyone who decides to
start directing traffic.
 PHILOSOPHICAL ANARCHISM AND ITS FALLACIES 403

But let us suppose that distinguishing administrative preroga-

tives from laws will do the work that Edmundson wants the
distinction to do. He will then have made his case that the legit-
imacy of the state does not entail a general duty to obey its
laws; but will he have overcome the objections of the philosoph-
ical anarchists? His arguments may assuage the worries of those
“eminent professors” whose doubts about political obligation tempt
them towards anarchism; they may also respond to Simmons’s a
posteriori brand of anarchism. But they have nothing to say to
Wolff’s a priori anarchism. What makes political authority illegit-
imate for Wolff is that it requires us to surrender the moral autonomy
that we have a duty never to surrender. On Wolff’s conception of
autonomy, accepting the authority of administrative prerogatives is
as much a violation of autonomy as accepting the authority of the
law. “For the autonomous man,” as Wolff says, “there is no such
thing, strictly speaking, as a command” – a point he illustrates with
the following apposite example:
if I am on a sinking ship and the captain is giving orders for manning the lifeboats,
and if everyone else is obeying the captain because he is the captain, I may decide
that under the circumstances I had better do what he says, since the confusion
caused by disobeying him would be generally harmful. But insofar as I make such
a decision, I am not obeying his command; that is, I am not acknowledging his
authority over me. I would make the same decision, for exactly the same reasons,
if one of the passengers had started to issue “orders” and had, in the confusion,
come to be obeyed.25

What applies to the ship’s captain applies as well to the traffic

cop, the judge, or anyone who exercises administrative prerogative.
As autonomous persons, according to Wolff, we simply have no
obligation to obey, or not to resist, these prerogatives, for they
always amount to directives or commands that are incompatible
with our moral autonomy. Even if Edmundson is right, then, to
claim that the legitimacy of the state does not rest on the “Simple
Correlativity Thesis” – that is, that “a state is legitimate only if it
claims to impose and in fact does impose on its subjects a general,
at least prima facie, duty to obey its laws” (p. 36) – he will still
not have overcome the objections of the most thorough-going of the
philosophical anarchists.
25 Ibid., pp. 15–16 (Wolff’s emphasis).
404 RICHARD DAGGER

IV

But that is hardly to say that the anarchists are right. To the contrary,
Edmundson has uncovered two truly unwarranted presumptions –
the “ ‘law is coercive’ fallacy” and the “inner sphere of privacy
fallacy” – that tend to undermine confidence in the legitimacy of the
state. That conclusion holds even if one insists that wrongfulness
is not a necessary condition of coercion. A conception of coercion
that allows for the possibility of rightful coercion, as in Hardin’s
“mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon,” places no special burden
on the law; for if the law is coercive in this neutral sense, it is neither
necessarily wrong nor necessarily suspicious. The question will then
be whether the law is rightly or wrongly coercive, and that question
cannot be settled simply by asserting that law is coercive.
According to my scoring, then, Edmundson is two for three in
his arguments against those who commit the “three anarchical falla-
cies” of his title. Nor does his one failure entail a success on the
philosophical anarchists’ part. That failure occurs when Edmundson
attempts to found political authority not on a general obligation to
obey the laws but on a duty not to resist administrative prerogatives.
In doing so he concedes too much to the anarchists and the other
“eminent professors” who deny that even the subjects of a just state
have even a prima facie obligation to obey its laws. In his otherwise
admirable survey of the arguments offered in support of political
obligation, Edmundson does not give adequate attention to what
currently seem to be the two leading theories in the field – those
deriving from membership and fairness.
In the first case, Edmundson takes the argument from member-
ship or association to fall under the “expectations” theory, which
“founds the duty to obey the law on the expectations we create
by living among others” (p. 21). Aside from a reference to Ronald
Dworkin’s discussion of “associative obligations” in Law’s Empire,
however, there is no exposition or analysis of the membership
argument, and Edmundson’s astute criticism of the “expectations”
theory does not really bear on the membership account of political
obligation.26 For that account relies on the claim that
26 Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986),
pp. 186–216.
 PHILOSOPHICAL ANARCHISM AND ITS FALLACIES 405

a polity is, like the family, a relationship into which we are mostly born; and
that the obligations which are constitutive of the relationship do not stand in
need of moral justification in terms of a set of basic moral principles or some
comprehensive moral theory. Furthermore, both the family and the political
community figure prominently in our sense of who we are: our self-identity and
our understanding of our place in the world.27

It is possible, of course, that treating the membership theory as a

separate and significant account of political obligation would have
led Edmundson to conclude that it is no more adequate than the other
theories he considers. Others have certainly doubted its efficacy.28
In the case of fair play, however, Edmundson acknowledges that,
“[f]ully worked out, a Principle of Fairness will rest not on an appeal
to fairness alone, but on a combination of factors whose joint power
offers the strongest nonconsensual foundation for obedience that
we are ever likely to have” (p. 31). He also admits that “there is
no knockdown argument showing the Principle of Fairness is false”
(p. 112). Rather than follow those who develop and defend the argu-
ment from fair play against its critics, however, Edmundson rests
his case for political authority on the supposedly uncontroversial
duty not to resist administrative prerogatives.29 But this will not
work, as I have argued, because the duty not to resist administrative

27 John Horton, Political Obligation (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities

Press, 1992), pp. 150–151. See also: Margaret Gilbert, “Group Membership
and Political Obligation,” The Monist 76 (January 1993), pp. 119–131; Michael
Hardimon, “Role Obligations,” The Journal of Philosophy 91 (July 1994),
pp. 333–363; and Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1993, chaps. 5 and 6.
28 A. John Simmons, “Associative Political Obligations,” Ethics 106 (January

1996), pp. 247–73; Christopher H. Wellman, “Associative Allegiances and Poli-

tical Obligations,” Social Theory and Practice 23 (Summer 1997), pp. 181–204;
and my own “Membership, Fair Play, and Political Obligation,” Political Studies
48 (March 2000), pp. 104–117.
29 For the principle of fairness, see, e.g., Richard Arneson, “The Principle

of Fairness and Free-Rider Problems,” Ethics 92 (July 1982), pp. 616–633;

George Klosko, The Principle of Fairness and Political Obligation (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1992); and Jonathan Wolff, “Political Obligation, Fairness,
and Independence,” Ratio 8 (April 1995), pp. 87–99. I develop my own position in
Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997), chap. 5.
406 RICHARD DAGGER

prerogatives itself relies on, or collapses into, a general obligation

to obey the law.
Edmundson’s attempt to evade the problem of political obligation
by concentrating his attention on the weaknesses of the “anarch-
ical tendencies” he exposes is, therefore, only partly successful. He
does indeed reveal weaknesses in the positions of the philosoph-
ical anarchists and those who share their presumptions. But he also
needs, at some point, a positive argument for political authority. He
recognizes as much when he says, in the concluding chapter, that
“to establish a conclusion” – in this case, that a legitimate state is
possible – “it is never enough to expose the fallacious argument for
its denial” (p. 180). The irony is that he has the ingredients for the
positive argument he needs ready to hand in the principle of fairness
and the “service conception” of authority that he, following Joseph
Raz, sketches in his conclusion. In particular, he could elaborate
the insight that the “service conception” takes autonomy to be a
matter of “output” (p. 184). Autonomy is something to be achieved
or attained, in other words, and, contrary to the anarchical tendency
to think of authority as the enemy of autonomy, political authority
is essential to the achievement and exercise of autonomy.
Despite the modesty of his aims, in sum, Edmundson has done
more than point out the flawed reasoning that contributes to “a
fundamental distrust of state power” (p. 1). He has also pointed the
way to a positive argument for the legitimacy of the state. If he has
not proceeded far along this path in Three Anarchical Fallacies, we
should be grateful that he has cleared away so much of the under-
brush and overgrowth that have obscured it – and hopeful that he
will proceed farther in the future.

Department of Political Science

Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-2001
E-mail: rdagger@asu.edu