Three Anarchical Fallacies: An Essay on Political Authority

by William A. Edmundson

• ISBN13: 9780521037518
• ISBN10: 0521037514
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-07-12
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

How is a legitimate state possible? Obedience, coercion, and intrusion are three ideas that seem inseparable from all government and seem to render state authority presumptively illegitimate. This book exposes three fallacies inspired by these ideas and in doing so challenges assumptions shared by liberals, libertarians, cultural conservatives, moderates, and Marxists. In three clear and tightly-argued essays William Edmundson dispels these fallacies and shows that living in a just state remains a worthy ideal. This is an important book for all philosophers, political scientists, and legal theorists as well as readers interested in the views of Rawls, Dworkin, and Nozick, many of whose central ideas are subjected to rigorous critique.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

The Fallacious Argument from the Failure of Political Obligation

Legitimacy and the duty to obey

The correlativity thesis

Legitimate political authority

The -Law is Coercive- Fallacy

The concept of coercion

Political theory without coercion

Coercion Redivivus

The Inner Sphere of Privacy Fallacy

The private sphere

The moral and the social

The social and the political

Conclusion: the state for what?

Index

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