WILLIAM A. EDMUNDSON LEGITIMATE AUTHORITY WITHOUT POLITICAL OBLIGATION It has commonly been thought that citizens of a reasonably just state have a prima facie duty to obey its laws. In recent years, however, a number of influential political philosophers have concluded that this idea must be given up – concluded, that is, that there is no general, prima facie duty to obey the law. 1 But how can the state be a legitimate authority if there is no general duty to obey its laws? This is the problem that I will address; what I hope to show is that we can make sense of the idea of legitimate political authority without positing the existence of a general duty to obey the law. The problem can be put differently. Consider the following set of propositions: 1. A state is a legitimate authority 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. The logical tension within this set is plain; the truth of any pair of the three entails the falsity of the third. If there is no general duty to obey the law – no general political obligation, in other words – then if the first of the triad of propositions is also true we are logically impelled toward the view called philosophical anarchism, which is the denial of the third proposition, that legitimate states are possible and actual. 1 Leslie Green, “Who Believes in Political Obligation?” in John T. Sanders and Jan Narveson (eds.), For and Against the State (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), p. 28; Philip Soper, “Legal Theory and the Claim of Authority”, Philosophy & Public Affairs (1989), pp. 209, 211. Law and Philosophy 17: 43–60, 1998. c 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.