How many people do you guys think agree with him? I would submit that perhaps some majority actually does. This dovetails with my thesis that the state began as the extended family writ large, and that that’s its ultimate basis even today.
On the other hand, I disagree with his characterization of a father telling his children to not swim in the river. I think it proves too much, in fact. For example, taking his characterization as true would mean that a girl who tells a guy to not call her again is also “one party using coercion to force another party what he can or cannot do”. Likewise, employer-employee relationships would also be considered as coercive.
I think this highlights that “authority” is not a descriptive concept - it’s a necessarily normative one. The descriptive counterpart to “authority” per se is the observation that one person considers another person to have “authority”, or even that a person considers himself to have it. So the question of “authority” per se comes back to legitimacy.
That said, if a person like “GWil” would consider anarcho-capitalism to be a state, that’s honestly fine by me. I don’t think it would be one, so the only conclusion I could derive is that his definition of “state” is simply different from mine. But a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
“A family consisting of a father, mother, and children is itself a form of government.”
My response if I was debating him: Then I do not advocate an anarchist society. Only a Utopian would ever argue that we can have a society entirely devoid of any sort of force. Our disagreements arise, not from anyone’s idiocy but merely from different definitions. I wish to minimize force as much as is possible and make it based around individual . I’m sure you would agree that simply because force is necessary in all societies does not mean that it is justified to let force be unleashed an unrestricted in a police state.
My feeling: Stop using emotional appeals and dodging what ‘anarchists’ are actually saying and address the issue
A lot of people will fall back onto such excuses when confronted with the idea of a stateless society. “Without X there would be chaos!! It’s insane to imagine that people could live under Y conditions.” You know, the same forumula that were given by the monarchic elites when reffering to a liberal democratic society a few centuries ago, and the same formula that almost all of the people during revolutionary times would say if talking about the kind of society we live in.
This is a really interesting point, but I’m not sure I agree (or maybe I’m misunderstanding). I mean, can’t we look at the world and observe what we call “authority,” regardless of normative claims of legitimacy?
Before I answer that, I just want to point out that any sort of problems that might exist in defining authority aren’t isolated to a descriptive approach - the same questions can be raised against a normative treatment.
I’m still not going to define “authority” actually, because I don’t think its useful to do so. I mean, if I say “the father has authority over his child” or “the employer has authority of the employees,” you know exactly what I’m talking about. In either case, we can observe authority through rule giving and following.
Legitimacy can also be treated positively once we recognize that in many cases, legitimacy is a necessary condition of authority. So even though it’s normative at its core, we can observe the emergence of real institutions (religion, law, language, ethics) that are legitimate in their own right, without having to appeal to the content of their legitimacy.
Wow, ok. If I give a definition, are you going to pick it apart, asking for further definitions ad infinitum? Or, are you going to point out that some aspect of what we want to call “authority” is excluded by the definition?
Thank you. However, I’m surprised you agree with me that “legitimacy” is a necessary concept for “authority”. It seemed like you were arguing otherwise.
Now then, let me ask you: how do you think legitimacy can be observed in the world?
“We” is you and me and anyone else who feels inclined to join the conversation. Sometimes we might agree and hold a common value, so to say “we want” isn’t a problem there.
And I totally agree that legitimacy is a necessary concept for authority, sorry for the confusion. I just don’t think that we need to fully indulge in the normative side of things.
Legitimacy, in the abstract, can’t be observed. But if something holds legitimacy as a precondition, and that something can be observed, then we can deduce legitimacy from there. In the case of authority, we can observe acts of power that would not be feasible otherwise, therefore, they are legitimate.
