Three Anarchical Fallacies: An Essay on Political Authority

by William A. Edmundson

• ISBN13: 9780521624541
• ISBN10: 0521624541
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-09-28
• 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

Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	1	(6)
Part One. The Fallacious Argument from the Failure of Political Obligation	7	(66)
1 Legitimacy and the Duty to Obey	7	(28)
2 The Correlativity Thesis	35	(13)
3 Legitimate Political Authority	48	(25)
Part Two. The "Law Is Coercive" Fallacy	73	(54)
4 The Concept of Coercion	73	(11)
5 Political Theory without Coercion	84	(10)
6 Coercion Redivivus	94	(33)
Part Three. The Inner Sphere of Privacy Fallacy	127	(52)
7 The Private Sphere	127	(12)
8 The Moral and the Social	139	(16)
9 The Social and the Political	155	(24)
Conclusion: The State for What?	179	(8)
Index	187