Introduction

In the forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, right at the heart of Africa, lives a pygmy people called the Mbuti. They move about the forest in small groups of several families, gathering honey and hunting antelope, and sometimes joining together with other groups for a communal hunt.

There is no doubt, then, that we can speak of the Mbuti as form­ing a society. Their language, customs, and beliefs bind them together and make their culture distinctive. Yet what is extraordi­nary about this society, for us and for people from most other soci­eties, is that the Mbuti have no political organization. Of course, they are now citizens of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and they have social relations with the taller farming peoples who live on the edge of the forest. But among themselves they live pretty much as they did before there was a modern state around them. They do without the apparatus that regulates most societies. They have no chiefs or kings, no laws or courts, no government of any kind: in short, the Mbuti have no politics.

Since political philosophy examines the concepts we use to think about politics, it may seem strange to begin this chapter by dis­cussing the Mbuti.

Why, then, does Mbuti society not constitute a small state? They clearly have social conventions (including those of language), and they are able to settle disputes and regulate their common life. So we cannot say that a state is just any collection of people, with shared conventions, organized in such a way that they are able to regulate their lives together. Rather, the key distinction between the Mbuti and societies organized into states has to do with the way they settle disputes and organize their communal life.

Mbuti methods of hunting require the cooperation of many indi­viduals; without the hunting they would not be able to feed them­selves adequately. When one of them behaves antisocially, there­fore, by disrupting a hunt or failing to play his or her part in it, something needs to be done to get that person to change his or her behavior. In many societies, this would be done by the state. If you or I fail to carry out our duties as citizens, we may first be ordered to obey the law by police officers or other officials, and then tried in a court and punished if we refuse. In most earlier societies, a chief or a king or queen could have ordered you to carry out your duty, and would have ordered you to be punished if you disobeyed. But the Mbuti gain each other's cooperation in a way that is much more like the way we persuade our friends to help us. Sometimes, for example, they tease those who fail to live up to their obligations. On other occasions, they try to persuade antisocial men and women by reminding them of the obligations that all Mbuti acknowledge, or they point out how important cooperation is if they are to survive.

The key difference between Mbuti society and a state, therefore, is that among the Mbuti there is no single recognized person or group that has the authority to gain compliance with its rulings through the use of force.

It was the great German sociologist Max Weber who had the fun­damental insight that what distinguishes the state is the monopoly of the authority to use force. In order to understand the full signifi­cance of Weber's view, we need to understand the notion of author­ity that is involved here. And the first thing we must recognize is that having authority involves meeting both factual and evaluative conditions.

Let us take the factual conditions first. If you are to have author­ity, as some monarchs and the assemblies of democracies do, you need both to be able to enforce rulings—to have the capacity to police them—and to have fairly widespread acceptance, within the society, of the exercise of that capacity. However much we feel that leaders who have been removed by an illegitimate military coup d'etat ought to be regarded as having the authority to govern a coun­try, if they are simply unable to enforce any rulings, we would not say that they have authority in that country. To have authority you need to have some degree of power.

That, then, is the factual condition for having authority. But if a group of bandits takes over an area and is able to enforce its rulings by the simple threat of force, that does not constitute an exercise of authority. To call such control the exercise of authority, we would need also to believe that the bandits had the right to exercise it. People may disagree substantially on what gives someone the right to exercise control over others; they may dispute the moral basis of authority.

It follows that Mbuti society would not turn into a state simply because someone among them was able to control the actions of the Mbuti by threat of force. A bandit leader who could control the Mbuti would satisfy the factual condition for authority without satis­fying the evaluative condition. Thus, the primary conceptual ques­tion of political philosophy—what is a state?—leads immediately to the primary moral question of political philosophy—under what circumstances does a person or group have the right to control a soci­ety? This is the question of the justification of political authority.

6.2