Legitimate and illegitimate authority

It is tempting to think that legitimate and illegitimate authorities are both types of a single thing. One might not want to call that single thing “authority”. After all, one doesn’t want to say that real and fake money are both types of money. But it sure seems like there is something X that legitimate and illegitimate authorities have in common with each other, and with nothing else. One imagines that a dictator and a lawfully elected president are in some way both doing the same kind of thing, “ruling” or whatever.

But this now seems to me to be mistaken. Or at least I can’t think what X could be. The only candidate I can think of is the trivial disjunctive property of being a legitimate authority or an illegitimate authority.

To a first approximation, one might think that the legitimate and illegitimate authorities both engage in the speech act of commanding. One might here try to object that “commanding” has the same problem as “authority” does: that it is not clear that legitimate and illegitimate commands have anything in common. This criticism seems to me to be mistaken: the two may not have any normative commonality, but they seem to be the same speech act.

However, imagine that Alice is the legitimate elected ruler of Elbonia, but Bob has put Alice in solitary confinement and set himself up as a dictator. Alice is not crazy: when she is in solitary confinement she isn’t commanding anyone as there is no one for her to command. Alice is a legitimate authority and Bob is an illegitimate authority, yet they do not have commanding, or ruling, or running the country in common. (Similarly, even without imprisonment, we could suppose Alice is a small government conservative who ran on a platform of not issuing any orders except in an emergency, and no emergency came up and she kept her promise.)

One might think that they have some kind of dispositional property in common. Alice surely would command if she were to get out of prison, after all. Well, maybe, but we need to specify the conditions quite carefully. Suppose she got out of prison but thought that no one would follow her commands, because she was still surrounded by Bob’s flunkies. Then she might not bother to command. It makes one look bad if one issues commands and they are ignored. Perhaps, though, we can say: Alice would issue commands if she thought they were needed and likely to be obeyed. But that can’t be the disposition that defines a legitimate or illegitimate authority. For many quite ordinary people in the country presumably have the exact same disposition: they too would issue commands if they thought they were needed and likely to be obeyed! But we don’t want to say that these people are either legitimate or illegitimate authorities.

We might argue that Alice isn’t a legitimate authority while imprisoned, because she is incapacited, and incapacitation removes legitimate authority. One reason to be dubious of this answer is that on a plausible account of incapacitation, insanity is a form of incapacitation. But an insane illegitimate dictator is still an illegitimate authority, and so incapacitation does not remove the disjunctive property legimate or illegitimate authority, but at most it removes legitimacy. Thus, Alice might still be an authority, but not an illegitimate one. Another reason is this: we could imagine that in order to discourage people from incapacitating the legitimate ruler, the laws insist that one remains in charge if one’s incapacitation is due to an act of rebellion. Moreover, we might suppose that Bob hasn’t actually incapacitated Alice. He lets her walk around and give orders freely, but his minions kill anybody who obeys, so Alice doesn’t bother to issue any orders, because either they will be disobeyed or the obeyers will be killed.

Perhaps we might try to find a disposition in the citizenry, however. Maybe what makes Alice and Bob be the same kind of thing is that the citizens have a disposition to obey them. One worry about this is this: Suppose the citizens after electing Alice become unruly, and lose the disposition to obey. It seems that Alice could still be the legitimate authority. I suppose someone could think, however, that some principles of democracy would imply that if there is no social disposition to obey someone, they are no longer an authority, legitimate or not. I am dubious. But there is another objection to finding a common disposition in the citizenry. The citizenry’s disposition to obey Bob could easily be conditional on them being unable to escape the harsh treatment he imposes on the disobedient and on him actually issuing orders. So the proposal now is something like this: z is a legitimate authority or an illegitimate authority if the citizenry would be disposed to obey z if z were to issue orders backed up credible threats of harsh treatment. But it could easily be that a perfectly ordinary person z satisfies this definition: people would obey z if z were to issue orders backed up by credible threats!

Let’s try one more thing. What fake and real money have in common is that they are both objects made to appear to be real money. Could we say that both Alice and Bob claim have this in common: They both claim to (“pretend to”, in the old sense of “pretend” that does not imply “falsely” as it does now) be the legitimate authority? Again, that may not be true. Alice is in solitary confinement. She has no one to make such claims to. Again, we can try to find some dispositional formulation, such as that she would claim it if she thought it beneficial to do so. But again many quite ordinary people would claim to be the legitimate authority if they thought it beneficial to do so. Moreover, Bob can be an illegitimate authority without any pretence to legitimacy! He need not claim, for instance, that people have a duty to obey him, backing up his orders by threat rather than by claimed authority. (It is common in our time that dictators pretend to a legitimacy that they do not have. But this is not a necessary condition for being an illegitimate authority.) Finally, if Carl is a crazy guy who claims to have been elected and no one, not even Carl’s friends and family, pays any attention to his raving, it does not seem that Carl is an illegitimate authority.

None of this denies the thesis that there is a similarity between illegitimate authority and legitimate authority. But it does not seem possible to turn that similarity into a non-disjunctive property that both of these share. Though maybe I am just insufficiently clever.