Three anarchical fallacies : an essay on political authority

How is a legitimate state possible? Obedience, coercion, and intrusion are three ideas that seem inseparable from all government and seem to render state authority presumptively illegitimate. This book exposes three fallacies inspired by these ideas and in doing so challenges assumptions shared by liberals, libertarians, cultural conservatives, moderates, and Marxists.

The first fallacy links the state's right to rule to its subjects' having a duty to obey. If legitimacy entails a right to rule, doubts about the duty to obey seem to foreclose a legitimate state. The second fallacy assumes that the law is coercive. This assumption appears to entail that the state bears the burden of justifying its own existence and that state inaction is preferable to action. The third fallacy depicts morality as two concentric circles, of which the law may police only the outer one. In a clear and tightly argued essay William Edmundson dispels these fallacies and shows that living in a just state remains a worthy ideal.

This is an important book for all philosophers, political scientists, and legal theorists, as well as other readers interested in the views of Rawls, Dworkin, and Nozick, many of whose central ideas are subjected to rigorous critique.