Troubles with legitimate authority

With the issue of legitimate exercise of authority in a democracy forming the background, I pursue three interrelated goals in the paper. Firstly, through a Hohfeldian approach to the concept of right, I aim to clarify what we mean by attributing to political authority a general right to rule (through legal norms) and on the recipients of its decisions a general obligation to obey these norms, construed as content-independent and preemptive. In this regard, careful differentiation between legal and moral rights and obligations appears crucial; legitimate authority then reappears as morally justified right to rule. Secondly, in contrast to the standard approach in political and legal theory which interprets the right to govern as a Hohfeldian claim and the obligation of obedience as a Hohfeldian duty, conceiving these positions as symmetrical and inseparable (‘correlative’), I argue that it is more fitting to focus on the Hohfeldian power and its corresponding liability. This implies abandoning the assumption of the content-independence and preemptiveness of authority’s decisions. Thirdly, I emphasise that morality (as in ‘morally justified right to rule’) cannot remain a theoretical black box, the content and validity of which are simply assumed in discussions about legitimate authority, and suggest how this can be circumvented via exploring the links among the idea of public justification, the need to cultivate mutual expectations regarding collectively binding rules, and the claim that we owe the obligation to fellow participants in social cooperation rather than political authority as such. Theoretically, the paper seeks to find a theoretical position that does not slide either towards the acceptance of the ‘self-image of the state’ as in the case of the standard approach, or towards the ‘nightmare’ of philosophical anarchism. Practically speaking, I look for an ecumenical conception of legitimate authority that can help counterbalance the ‘Us vs. Them’ dynamic palpable in contemporary democratic societies.