ABSTRACT
Answer Plan Professor Raz (in the essay ‘Legitimate authority’, collected in The Authority of Law (1979)) commented that there is little surprise that the notion of authority is one of the most controversial concepts in legal and political philosophy, since the concept of authority has a central role in any discussion of legitimate forms of social organisation. The attempt to justify political authority starts with the end of Bible based arguments for political authority in the mid-seventeenth century. Both Hobbes (1588-1679) and Locke (1632-1704) attempted to justify political authority through the emergence of authority from an anarchic ‘state of nature’. In modern times, the whole notion of political authority has come under severest attack from the school of thought known as ‘philosophical anarchism’. The ‘normal justification thesis’ for justifying political authority given by Professor Raz can be viewed as the most persuasive rebuttal of the challenge posed by philosophical anarchism to the possibility of legitimate political authority. A skeleton argument is given.
