ABSTRACT
People, large numbers of them in fact, have gone their way firm in their belief that being involved in government and policy decisions was (is) not their place. And critics of polities where government is an exclusive specialism and obedience to it expected as of right might think of such as slave states Political authority is a system, which comes in a variety of forms, for co-ordinating the activities of humans in society where, without co-ordination, the results are P-inferior. In this chapter two arguments, the latter emerging from a perspective provided by the former, are considered. The first argument rehearses the “extremely high standards”, to use De George’s phrase, of legitimacy which anarchist sceptics demand of statehood. The second argument outlines a political scheme in which authority and autonomy are reconciled and incorporated in an acephalous co-operative. R. P. Wolff in his In Defence of Anarchism drives a sharp conceptual wedge between authority and autonomy.
