Michael Sevel joined the University of Sydney, Australia, in 2012 as Lecturer in Jurisprudence. Previously he was Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Miami School of Law (2011-12), where he taught jurisprudence, torts, and admiralty law, and Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Law of the European University Institute (2010-11).

 

The most influential account of the nature and justification of practical authority in the English-speaking world over the last century is Joseph Raz’s “service conception” of authority. On that conception, authorities, and especially political authorities, are legitimate only if they provide a service, or confer a benefit, on those persons who subject their will to them. Raz thinks the service done by legitimate authorities is necessarily that they help their subjects conform better to reasons for action which apply to them independently of the authority. This idea is usually taken by legal and political philosophers to have originated with Raz, but I show in this paper that view to be mistaken. The general idea that authorities, when legitimate, provide a service or benefit to those subject to them in fact has a long but unacknowledged history in Western philosophy. I examine its origins in Plato and Aristotle, as well as in the thought of the British utilitarians, primarily Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. I show that, after all, Raz’s conception is an interesting synthesis of all of these views, blending together both classical and modern themes about the role and value of political authority.