Is Government Legitimate?

The division between theory and pragmatism can either be a puddle or a vast ocean; in political theory, the latter is often the case.  It is with this realization that I offer the following: I wish to discuss both the theoretical and practical justifications of government.  Just to put it out there, I am a philosophical anarchist.  That is, when I am talking about what should be, I am anarchist.  When I discuss what is, or what should be within the current system, I am a libertarian.  Is this inconsistent of me?  Perhaps, but as I previously mentioned, there is a difference between theory and practice.  Some might take umbrage with this, but allow me to explain.

First, let's look at the justification of government.  This is probably nothing my readers (being the brilliant minds you are) don't know, but it's good to refresh the memory of such things just to start.  Rather than spelling out the entire history of how governments form and why and all that, I'll simplify all of this.  There was before government a state of nature in which all human beings existed.  This is not theoretical; humans must have come before government because humans had to create government.  What is theoretical is what exactly the state of nature was like (or is like) and how government evolved from this.  Many prolific and respected philosophers wrote on this: Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, etc.  There were evils in this state of nature that needed to be controlled.  In order for these to be controlled, there had to be rules.  In order for there to be rules, there had to be impartial and just enforcers of the rules.  Thus, government arose.  

This was the practical way of solving these problems, and it worked, in a way.  However, people started observing government from a philosophical perspective eventually.  This is because, over time, the evils in the state of nature started looking tame compared to the evils of government; the rules put into place were more restrictive than the restrictions of life without government; and the enforcement of the unjust laws became partial and unfair.  At this point, the Leviathan they created truly became a monster.  Questions inevitably were raised.  Should we be forced to kneel at the feet of injustice?  Should we follow unjust laws?  Is government even legitimate at all?  Many theories were developed, most of them with good reasoning but in the end just didn't hold up.  There were a few, though, that still resonate.  

Liberty, until recent times, has been something that people tended to revere.  At the time many philosophers were forming their ideas, liberty was still something that was to be taken into consideration.  Many people, even to day, take liberty to be something to be considered on a theoretical level; its practice, however, is rarely initiated.  So as not to make this a master's thesis, I won't delve into the history of the different political philosophers.  It should suffice to say that all respectable political philosophies take into consideration the idea of universal political obligation (though some have extremely different views on how this can be done than others).  This term can be confusing.  By political obligation, I mean to obligation to obey laws because they are part of the law, and not because of some independent moral justification.  By universal, this means it applies to anyone within the proclaimed boundaries of any government or authority.  Thus, in order for a government to be legitimate, it must be shown that all people within its boundaries are obligated to obey its laws intrinsically, or simply because they are the laws.

Sounds fine, right?  It's understood, for the sake of this argument, as an axiom that humans have individual rights (perhaps a topic for another post).  Because of this, how does one show universal political obligation whilst respecting individual rights?  This is where many theories divide.  Communism, liberalism (similar to what is now libertarianism), utilitarianism, among others, all formed at least partially based on different answers to this question (some more successfully than others; some completely redefining the meaning of "rights" unlike others).  

Again, it would take a very long post to go into all of these, and again maybe I'll get into this in another post, but some of these philosophers use the social contract as a way of justifying universal political obligation, and personally I consider this to be the strongest of them all.  The logic is sound:  in order to respect the rights of the people you govern, you need to have their consent to be governed.  This is widely considered to be the best way of going about this and is actually accepted by most people as legitimate.  John Locke, one of my main influences, used this way to justify the state.  It fails, however, in a couple of ways.  

First, there's the problem of knowing whether people are actually consenting or not.  Some have suggested that voting is a form of consent; however, if someone doesn't vote because they do not consent, yet they still live within the boundaries of a certain country, then that country's authority is thereby illegitimate, and thus the election nugatory.  From here, people will claim that merely living in a country to which you not consent is by default consenting to its authority.  There's a few problems with this, too, though.  The example which best demonstrates this is that of a slave ship, as Hume famously observed.  Imagine you're a slave on a slave ship.  You've been kidnapped in the middle of the night, knocked unconscious, and you've awoken aboard this ship.  You've had no choice in the matter; you're in this ship against your will and it was by no doing of your own.  You cannot flee, as you would drown in the ocean.  

This example should help to show why staying put is not the same as consenting.  Many people not only were born in a country or region and thus had no say in whether they were there or not, but they also may not have the means to leave.  In such a case, it's absurd to say they are consenting simply because they haven't fled.  They may not be able to afford the trip, or, there may not be anywhere to go (if the dissenter is an anarchist, there's no region that lacks a state on Earth that's habitable as far as I know).  This isn't the only problem with consent. 

If everyone in a state must consent to its authority, then they must do so at all times.  There is no practical or even really theoretical way of discerning at every second of every day whether every person under an authority consents to such an authority.  This really is the final nail in the coffin of consent -- whether hypothetical or tacit.

When one looks at it practically, however, the situation is quite convoluted.  People have a conception of anarchy (which may be correct or it may be erroneous) that it would amount to mass chaos and strife.  Government reaches to almost all corners of the world -- almost all people on earth are under some kind of government authority.  Given this, it is impractical to try to go directly from statism to anarchy.  That is mass chaos.  Is anarchy even practical in the real world at all?  We cannot know; I don't think it has been tried in modern history.  So theoretically, anarchy is the only legitimate way to live, but in reality, it may not be able to work.  For some, government is a "necessary evil".  This is where libertarianism comes into play.  For philosophical anarchists, libertarianism is the best way (if not the only realistic way) to limit this "evil".  The smaller the government, the less the evil.  Perhaps supporting libertarianism, which works within the state, is in a way legitimizing the state.  But what alternative do anarchists have, really?  Stand idly by as the Leviathan grows larger?  Government, in theory and in practice, is illegitimate.  However, government still exists, and that's not going to change any time soon.  

During these times, with governments being at their largest in history, and markets becoming increasingly convoluted with laws, treaties, embargoes, and all of the other complexities of international trade and markets, perhaps the time where anarchy is finally tried isn't too far off, at least in small pockets.  Recent events have shown that governments are not stable, much less invincible.  So if anarchy is tried, we can observe how it works.  However, my hopes are not high, as any time there has not been government in history, government has developed.  This is the reality of government -- it has no right to exist, but its existence is inevitable.  

*Update: I accidentally posted this last night before I had finished it, so there's an extra two or three paragraphs at the end now.  Also, I've decided this will be the first in a series.  I'll have updates on utilitarianism, libertarianism,  and anarchy among other things related to the justification of the state.