What should we make of this failure? Michael Huemer, a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, offers a remarkable answer in his new book The Problem of Political Authority: governments’ claims to political authority are illusory and governments are illegitimate. The fact that he provides 365 pages of heresy against mainstream civic thought does not mean he’s wrong; rather, he begins from uncontroversial moral premises and then arrives at a robust theory of the illegitimacy of the state.

In the tradition of libertarian classics like Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty and David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom, Huemer defends his radical thesis against a number of traditional objections. The book is a handy and penetrating complement to recent works like Mark Pennington’s Robust Political Economy in that it offers a deeply practical treatment of serious political problems. While Huemer admits that he is writing for the educated and interested layperson and not an audience of specialists, scholars will have much to learn from The Problem of Political Authority.

Invalid claims to authority | In Part I, Huemer explains and then criticizes popular theories of the social contract, noting (for example) that moral reasoning leads to the conclusion that explicit dissent trumps implied or hypothetical consent, and “consent” cannot be present when there is no reasonable way of opting out. He argues in a series of examples and thought experiments that we are not actually bound by a social contract. On p. 31, to use just one example, he writes the following with respect to unconditional imposition (the idea that “an action can be taken as indicating a person’s agreement to some scheme only if the person can reasonably be assumed to believe that, if he did not take that action, then the scheme would not be imposed on him”):

Almost everyone knows that the state will still impose the same laws and the same taxes on one, regardless of whether one objects to the government, accepts government services, or participates in the political process. Therefore, one’s failure to object, one’s acceptance of government services, and even one’s participation in the political process cannot be taken to imply agreement to the social contract.

I suspect that a lot of readers will reject Huemer out-of-hand because they will think he is claiming to do what he explicitly says he is not doing: he is not trying to build a complete theory of justice. Rather, he is showing—on the basis of premises that people will not find controversial—that claims to political authority are invalid. Instead of trying to derive and apply cosmic principles, he takes ideas on which there is widespread and intuitive agreement and then uses them to make arguments non-specialists can understand. From uncontroversial ethical premises, he derives what is obviously a shocking and controversial conclusion: “I shall ultimately conclude that political authority is an illusion: no one has the right to rule, and no one is obliged to obey a command merely because it comes from the government.”

Dangers of authority | Huemer exhibits the virtues that make him a serious political philosopher. As an economist, I took deep satisfaction from the fact that he was constantly asking, “Compared to what?” In particular, he shows that many of the objections to statelessness based on intuitive senses of obligation fail when we consider whether anarchy is in fact actually better than a society with a state. He deconstructs welfare state apologetics, for example, by noting that the way the programs work in the real world is very different from the way they work in the ideal scenarios envisioned by interventionists. As he notes on p. 154, “Existing programs are almost entirely aimed at the wrong people and the wrong problems.”

One of the most interesting bodies of research at the intersection of cognitive science, psychology, economics, and politics is the discovery of ways that human brains don’t work particularly well. Rolf Dobelli catalogues these in The Art of Thinking Clearly and Daniel Kahneman offers a detailed and incisive explanation of how we are simply not good intuitive statisticians in Thinking, Fast and Slow. These discoveries have important implications for how we understand political authority—but not in the way a lot of people believe.

Curiously, people interpret these insights as evidence against markets and evidence for the desirability of government action. This ignores the fact that government actors are hampered by the same cognitive failures, but in this case the cognitive failures are compounded by potentially pathological incentives. The most obvious is the fact that since they face no profit and loss signals, bureaucrats cannot know whether their activities are creating value. (See Ludwig von Mises’ short but excellent Bureaucracy for a deep discussion of the problems of bureaucratic management.)

Less obvious is “the psychology of authority,” which Huemer explores in Chapter 6. He invokes two of the most famous experiments in the literature of authority: Stanley Milgram’s work at Yale in which he showed that an unsettling number of people are effectively willing to torture a human being to death as long as they are told to do so by an authority figure, and the Stanford Prison Experiment in which students randomly chosen to be guards heaped horrific abuses on people randomly chosen to be prisoners. In the first case, obedience to authority—“just following orders”—rationalized what would have been torture or murder had the experiment actually been real. (Huemer goes so far as to note that “[r]espect for authority was Hitler’s key weapon” (p. 109).) He further points out that political authority is what ultimately creates murder on the scale governments perpetrated in the 20th century. Similar dynamics were on display during the My Lai massacre. Our buggy cognitive software, what we do with cognitive dissonance, and our tendency to follow authority down very dark paths combine to weaken the case for centralization and strengthen the case for individual autonomy.

The case for autonomy as against authority is further strengthened by the work of scholars like Elinor Ostrom and James Buchanan. Building on the work of Friedrich Hayek, they documented the ways people develop institutions to solve collective action problems through decentralized channels in the face of uncertainty about what some of the problems even are, to say nothing of the appropriate solutions. Developing a context in which we can get the incentives right is of paramount importance, and Huemer documents how political authority is ill-suited to this. Not only do we have faulty cognitive software, but when we claim “political authority” as a means by which societies solve problems, we filter our cognitive faults through a process that allows us to impose large costs on others at very small costs to ourselves. It is very easy, for example, to rationalize our support for prohibitions and then blame those who wish to have sex, imbibe various substances, or take risks of which we do not approve because we pay very small prices for the unintended consequences of our actions.

Beyond government | Huemer’s volume is really two books in one. The first part, which I’ve already discussed, criticizes popular theories of political legitimacy. The second illuminates the characteristics of a “Society Without Authority” and explains just how we might establish such a world while avoiding what Harold Demsetz called “the nirvana fallacy.” In discussing that more perfect society, Huemer grounds his claims in generalizations about how people actually are and not how he imagines the “new anarchist man” to be once he is reacquainted with his species-essence.

It’s in this section that readers will especially appreciate Huemer’s skill at structuring his material: this is one of the best-organized books I’ve ever read. He states and re-states his arguments very clearly throughout his chapters, he anticipates and deals with objections to his main points, he offers an analytical table of contents that presents readers with the full argument in just a few pages, and he then summarizes and recaps the argument of the entire volume in his final pages. Throughout, you will ask questions like, “What about the poor? What about defense? What about…,” only to find that he anticipates and answers objections to his thesis quite ably by noting that the offered political “solutions” can be expected to make the problems worse, not better.

Huemer has gone to great lengths and pains to write a book that is clear and accessible, and that avoids the expository gymnastics all too common in academia. I expect that this will become a classic reference for people who agree with him and even those who don’t.