The puzzle of legitimate command — from divine and natural order to consent, charisma, and the anarchist claim that no such right can exist.
When does someone have the right to be obeyed — and why should anyone accept it?
Authority is power that claims to be rightful — the difference between a mugger who says 'your money or your life' and a tax collector who says the same. To have authority is to hold a right to be obeyed, so that a command counts as a reason for action simply because it was issued by the right person or office. Where does such a right come from? Classical and medieval thinkers grounded it in nature or in God; modern contract theorists relocated it in the consent of the governed; sociologists asked instead why people in fact treat commands as binding. Against them all stands the anarchist, who denies that anyone can ever have the right to command an autonomous person. The disagreements reveal how fragile — and how indispensable — the idea of legitimate rule really is.
Ancient Greek
Authority should belong to those who know the good — the philosopher-rulers — just as the sick rightly obey the physician and passengers the navigator. Legitimacy rests on knowledge, not on numbers or force; rule by the ignorant many is like a ship steered by the crew rather than the one who understands the stars.
Republic; Statesman.
Peripatetic
Some forms of rule are natural and for the good of the ruled — as of parent over child or statesman over citizens who take turns ruling and being ruled. Legitimate political authority is exercised over free and equal persons for the common good; it is corrupted when rulers govern in their own interest, turning monarchy into tyranny and aristocracy into oligarchy.
Politics, Books I and III.
Christian (Patristic)
Earthly authority is ordained by God as a remedy for sin, keeping a fallen humanity in outward peace even when rulers are wicked. 'Without justice, what are kingdoms but great robberies?' — yet subjects owe obedience to the temporal order for the sake of peace, reserving their ultimate allegiance to the City of God.
The City of God (413–426).
Scholasticism
Legitimate authority is that which directs the community to the common good in accordance with reason; a human law that contradicts the natural or divine law is 'a perversion of law' and does not bind in conscience. Rulers hold power from God through the natural order, but a tyrant who governs for himself may in extreme cases be resisted.
Summa Theologiae, I-II, qq. 90–97 (Treatise on Law).
Social contract
Authority is created by covenant: individuals authorize a sovereign to act in their name, so that the sovereign's commands become their own acts. Because the alternative is the war of all against all, this authority must be absolute and undivided; the subject retains only the right to preserve his own life against direct threat.
Leviathan (1651), chs. 16–18.
Classical liberalism
Legitimate political authority arises only from the consent of the governed and is held in trust to protect life, liberty and property. Because it is limited and conditional, a government that turns against these ends dissolves its own authority, and the people retain the right to resist and to institute a new one.
Two Treatises of Government (1689).
Social contract / republicanism
'Force does not make right, and we are obliged to obey only legitimate powers.' Legitimate authority can rest only on convention: the social contract by which each places himself under the direction of the general will. Sovereignty then belongs inalienably to the people as a whole and can never be rightfully represented or transferred to a master.
The Social Contract (1762).
Anarchism
All coercive political authority is illegitimate, for the state can maintain itself only by domination and it corrupts whoever wields it. He accepts only the 'authority' of the expert — the bootmaker on boots, the scientist on science — freely and provisionally acknowledged; but he rejects any standing right of one person to command another as the root of servitude.
God and the State (1871); 'What Is Authority?'
Sociology
Rather than ask what makes authority just, he asks why people obey, and finds three pure grounds of legitimacy: tradition ('it has always been so'), charisma (devotion to an extraordinary leader), and legal-rational rule (obedience to impersonal, enacted rules). Modern states rest mainly on the last, embodied in bureaucratic administration.
Economy and Society; 'Politics as a Vocation' (1919).
Political theory
Authority is distinct both from coercion by force and from persuasion by argument: it commands an obedience in which those who obey retain their freedom and their reason. Rooted for the Romans in the founding and in tradition, genuine authority has, she argues, largely vanished from the modern world, leaving a dangerous vacuum too often filled by violence.
'What Is Authority?' in Between Past and Future (1961).
Philosophical anarchism
The moral autonomy of the individual — the duty to act on one's own reasoned judgment — is irreconcilable with the claim of any authority to be obeyed simply because it commands. Since submitting to authority means surrendering that judgment, there can be no legitimate de jure authority, and the only consistent stance is philosophical anarchism.
In Defense of Anarchism (1970).
Analytic legal philosophy
Legitimate authority is justified by the 'normal justification thesis': one has authority over another when following its directives lets that person better comply with the reasons that already apply to them. Authoritative commands are therefore 'exclusionary' — content-independent, pre-emptive reasons that replace one's own case-by-case deliberation, and they are legitimate only where they truly serve the subject's own ends.
The Authority of Law (1979); The Morality of Freedom (1986).