ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author aims to propose and defend a different view about the relation between authority and coercion, according to which the state’s claim to authority is inseparable from the rationale for coercion. He argues that legitimate authority starts from the question of how private parties may treat each other, and is always traceable to it. In order to make good on his claim, the author offers an alternative account of consent, coercion and authority, an account that he will claim to find in Kant’s Doctrine of Right. He sketches the way in which Immanuel Kant supposes that coercion is always at issue in the ways in which people interact. The idea of reconciling competing freedoms, and the related idea that coercion is always at issue in the way free persons treat each other, can be brought into focus by considering the ways in which freedom might be interfered with. Kant addresses this problem by identifying three ways.
