Justification, Legitimacy, and Social Embeddedness: Locke and Rawls on Society and the State

“The fundamental question of political philosophy,” wrote Robert Nozick memorably, “is whether there should be any state at all.” A. John Simmons concurs. For him, the task of “justifying the state” must take the following form: we should assume anarchism as a theoretical baseline and demonstrate that there can be at least one state type that is neither immoral nor inadvisable. Justification is a separate task, however, from showing that any particular state is legitimate for a particular individual, which means that the former has the right to rule over the latter. In “Justification and Legitimacy” Simmons contends that Locke’s political philosophy provides the model for the conceptual distinction between state justification and state legitimacy which has been lost in what he terms the Kantian turn of contemporary political philosophy. Modern followers of Kant, John Rawls chief among them, work with a conception of justification that is “doubly relativized” in comparison with the Lockean notion. Instead of providing anarchists with objective reasons for having states, Kantian justification is