In this paper, I argue that the pervasiveness of coercion in interpersonal relations may not undermine the legitimacy of the state but instead provide grounds for its justification. Drawing primarily on Arthur Ripstein’s Kantian framework - which conceives of coercion as interference with external freedom and rightful relations – I argue that the omnipresence of coercive potentials among private agents necessitates a public authority uniquely entitled to use coercion to uphold a system of reciprocal freedom. Rather than beginning with the state’s authority and asking when coercion is permissible, I follow Ripstein in reversing the order: legitimate authority arises from the necessity and need to resolve inevitable conflicts of external freedom through a system of public law. In contrast to liberal and utilitarian traditions that treat coercion as a regrettable but sometimes necessary limit on liberty, this paper develops the Kantian-Ripsteinian view that coercion (understood as the hindrance of a hindrance) is intrinsic to rightful relations and indispensable for their public realisation. I support this account with insights from Scott Anderson’s “enforcement” approach, which foregrounds coercive power as constitutive of social order, and Christopher Morris’s critique of the coercion-centered conception of the state. Finally, drawing on Elizabeth Anscombe’s reflections on the authority of the state, I argue that the capacity to right coercive wrongs – and to pre-empt their private execution – is not a regrettable feature of state power but its moral core. This coercion-first approach offers a novel route to state justification: not from consent, common goods, or moral duty, but from the structural necessity of an impartial coercive framework to make reciprocal freedom possible at all.
Chapter 14 · Abstract