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Mastery, Dependence, and the Ethics
of Authority
Mastery, Dependence,
and the Ethics
of Authority
A A R O N STA L NA K E R
1
3
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To my teachers
子曰：「溫故而知新，可以為師矣。」
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Conventions xi
1. Paradoxes of Freedom: Modern Western Difficulties with

Authority and Dependence 1
1.1. Introduction 1
1.2. “From Status to Contract”: Myths and Histories of
Authority’s Decline 7
1.3. Autonomy, Domination, and Legitimate Authority 15
1.4. Transformations of “Dependence” in the Modern West 24
1.5. Anti-paternalism and the Foreclosure of Autonomy 32
2. Early China and the Quest for Mastery 45
2.1. Introduction 45
2.2. Key Aspects of Early Chinese History 46
2.3. Memorializing Masters: Early Confucian Texts and
Their Characters 50
2.4. Construing “Early Confucianism” 56
2.5. Further Polishing of the “Chinese Mirror”: Problems
and Prospects 58
2.6. Philosophical Retrieval and the Peril of Blind Spots 67
3. Virtue, Skill, and Mastery 79
3.2. Skill, Virtue, and Practice According to Aristotle and MacIntyre 82
3.3. Alternative Readings of Aristotle That Highlight the Skill-Virtue
Analogy 87
3.4. Early Confucian Accounts of Virtue 91
3.5. Mastering “Ritual” 95
3.6. Mèngzǐ’s Account of Wisdom as Moral Discernment 103
3.7. Propriety and Wisdom in Relation to Other Virtues 115
3.8. Revisiting Virtue and Skill 117
4. The Confucian Dào: Mastery as the Fruit of Shared Practices 133
4.2. Practice-Centered Religiosity 135
4.3. The Value of the Essential Rú Practices 140
4.4. The Need for Authoritative Teachers 149
viii Contents
4.5. The Way as a Lifelong Path with Stages 151

4.6. Teaching (and Learning) How to Perform 156
4.6.1. Practical Mastery 158
4.6.2. Inspiring Models 166
4.6.3. Trustworthy Guides 170
5. Dependence, Autonomy, and the Varieties of Relationship 181
5.2. The Good Society 183
5.3. Subordinate Judgment: Obedience, Disobedience,
and Remonstration 194
5.4. Teachers and Students 199
5.5. Varieties of Dependence and Responsibility 205
5.6. Deference and Vulnerability Once More 215
6. Dreaming of a Meritocracy, Grappling with Reality 224
6.2. Realism, Idealism, and “Dark Consciousness” 225
6.3. Xúnzǐ on Giving Authority to the Wise 230
6.4. Divine Government versus Feasible Meritocracy 242
6.5. The Hierarchies of “Virtue” and “Position” 248
6.6. The Varieties of Legitimate Authority 252
7. Learning from the Early Confucians 268
7.2. Sagehood and the Danger of Domination 271
7.3. Autonomy Requires Relations of Training and Support 274
7.3.1. Cultivating Capabilities and Autonomy Competence 276
7.3.2. Relational Autonomy 280
7.3.3. Neo-republican Autonomy and Freedom from Domination 284
7.4. Embracing Dependence 289
7.5. Rethinking the Anarchist Challenge to Authority 300
7.6. Reimagining Expertise 306
Bibliography 317
Index 337
Acknowledgments
This book has been gestating for a long time, and I have incurred many debts.
I thank colleagues and friends at Indiana University, and remain delighted
to be a part of that intellectual community, especially our vibrant and colle-
gial Department of Religious Studies. I have learned much from participants
in the EPP colloquium, the Chinese reading group, and the Global and
Comparative Approaches to Religion, Ethics, and Political Theory seminar,
among other groups. A number of people have read large parts of the manu-
script, and it was significantly improved by their suggestions and questions—
notably by Michael Ing and P. J. Ivanhoe, who both gave me extensive and
helpful comments, as well as Ryan Collins, Aurelian Craiutu, Oliver Eberl,
Constance Furey, Bojue Hou, Naiyi Hsu, Hui Jiang, Mihee Kim-Kort, Simon
Luo, Aolan Mi, Patrick Michelson, Rick Nance, Gheorghe Pacurar, Meng
Zhang, and Kuangyu Zhao. I also very much appreciate the comments and
suggestions from two anonymous reviewers for Oxford University Press, as
well as the brisk professionalism of my editor, Peter Ohlin. Gretchen Knapp’s
editorial help has been invaluable. I am particularly grateful to my friend
and colleague Michael Ing, who has cheerfully endured almost infinite dis-
cussion of points large and small related to the ideas here, supported me
throughout, and taught me much. And I am thankful for many delightful
and stimulating talks with Rich Miller about ideas that eventually found their
way into this study.
Beyond those already mentioned, I have learned from conversations re-
lated to the book with, among others, Steve Angle, Cheryl Cottine, Susan
Blake, Nick Vogt, Rui Fan, Bharat Ranganathan, Hao Hong, Ruilin He, Lisa
Sideris, Winni Sullivan, Kevin Jaques, Huss Banai, Jeff Isaac, Kate Abramson,
Marcia Baron, Gary Ebbs, Bob Eno, Chuck Mathewes, Jeff Stout, Gustavo
Maya, Eric Gregory, Liz Bucar, Grace Kao, John Kelsay, Barney Twiss, Aline
Kalbian, Martin Kavka, Jock Reeder, the late Wendell Dietrich, Hal Roth,
Jung Lee, Lee Yearley, Bruce Grelle, Nigel Biggar, Joshua Hordern, Chip
Lockwood, Amy Olberding, Ted Slingerland, Eric Hutton, Jack Kline, Justin
Tiwald, David Wong, Bryan Van Norden, Michael Puett, Yong Huang,
Tongdong Bai, Robin Wang, Michael Slote, Erica Brindley, Karyn Lai,
x Acknowledgments
Alexus McLeod, Doug Berger, Benjamin Huff, Bryan Hoffert, Jud Murray,
Erin Cline, Frank Perkins, Tao Jiang, On-cho Ng, Keith Knapp, Christine
Swanton, Tim Dare, Brad Wendell, Sophie Grace Chappell, Steve Macedo,
Melissa Lane, Alan Patten, and Leora Batnitzky. I have presented versions
of parts of the manuscript in several venues, including at the Midwest
Conference on Chinese Thought; I would like to thank participants on all
these occasions for their helpful responses.
Part of section 1.2 appeared previously in “Mastery, Authority, and
Hierarchy in the ‘Inner Chapters’ of the Zhuāngzǐ,” in Soundings: An
Interdisciplinary Journal 95.3 (2012): 255–283. Parts of chapter 3 appeared in
an earlier form as “Virtue as Mastery in Early Confucianism,” in the Journal
of Religious Ethics 38.3 (September 2010): 404–428. I thank the editors of
both journals for allowing me to reuse and adapt this material.
I gratefully acknowledge timely financial support from the Indiana
University College Arts and Humanities Institute, the Chiang Ching-kuo
Foundation, and the Indiana University Office of the Vice President for
Research, which gave me needed time to focus on research and writing at
various points.
I am especially grateful for my family, who have taught me almost all that
I know about the real human basis for this book. In particular I thank my
wife, Kirsten Sword, for many fruitful conversations that originally stimu-
lated much of the research for this book, for discussions and help with rel-
evant historical scholarship, and for timely reading and editorial aid. My
children, Elena and Rowan, have grown up as I wrote this book, and have,
perhaps without meaning to, taught me a great deal about both mastery and
dependence along the way.
Conventions
I use the Pinyin system of Romanization throughout. Nevertheless, when

I include Chinese characters in the text I use the traditional complex forms.
Exceptions to the use of Pinyin include scholars’ names when they are
written in some other form of Romanization, such as Hao Chang (張灝). For
contemporary people, I follow the English-language rule of putting personal
names first and surnames second, even for Chinese names. For figures from
early China, my preferred practice is to refer to their standard honorific titles
in Pinyin, e.g., “Kǒngzǐ” instead of “Confucius,” and “Mèngzǐ” instead of
“Mencius.” I refer to other well-known figures from the tradition according
to their Chinese names, in a Chinese order (e.g., Zhū Xī). I capitalize Rú
(儒) when referring to the people, ideas, or tradition of thought and practice
known commonly in the West as “Confucian” or “Confucianism,” although
in this case, for variety, I use both “Rú” and “Confucian” interchangeably.
With regard to the word dào 道, a “path” or “way,” I keep the word lowercase
when I refer to a practice tradition such as archery, or use the word in a ge-
neric sense; when capitalized, Dào refers specifically to the Confucian “Way”
of life as a whole.
For works cited, I use the author-date system in both the endnotes and
the bibliography, and follow the conventions described in the Chicago
Manual of Style, as amended by Oxford University Press. For early Chinese
primary sources, I generally refer to the Chinese University of Hong Kong
Institute of Chinese Studies’ Ancient Chinese Text Concordance Series
《香港中文大學中國文化硏究所先秦兩漢古籍逐字索引叢刊》, un-
less otherwise noted. When citing specific passages in the texts, I refer to the
relevant concordance in the following format: “chapter/page/line.” However,
I also frequently cite whole passages from the Analects and Mèngzǐ in accord-
ance with the traditional style of “book.passage” for the Analects (e.g., 12.1) or
“chapter-division-passage” for the Mèngzǐ (e.g., 2A2). For the Xúnzǐ, I follow
Knoblock’s chapter and section scheme for citing whole passages (e.g., 19.1),
because this can be easily cross-referenced with Hutton’s excellent translation
or with Knoblock’s. For the Lǐjì, I have used the ICS Concordance (Lau and
Chen 1992) as well as the Chinese Text Project’s electronically published text
xii Conventions
(http://ctext.org/liji), which is based on a version of the widely available Táng

dynasty edition, the 禮記正義 (see Lü 2008). Citations to the Lǐjì are in the
form: chapter.CTP section.ICS section/ICS page/line(s). For an English trans-
lation, see Legge (1885). Translations are my own unless otherwise noted. I do
refer to other editions at times, especially when discussing textual or interpre-
tive issues. I abbreviate the Analects as LY (= Lúnyǔ 論語), the Mèngzǐ as M,
and the Xúnzǐ as X.
Mastery, Dependence, and the Ethics
of Authority
1
Paradoxes of Freedom
Modern Western Difficulties with Authority
and Dependence
1.1. Introduction
What are the proper roles of authority in a life well lived, and in flourishing
communities? How should we understand the relation of personal autonomy
to the authority of experts and other practical authorities, such as political
leaders? How many different kinds of authority are there, and how should
they be understood? This book addresses these and related questions, es-
pecially regarding various kinds of dependence, by means of a sustained
encounter with a potentially surprising source for new insights: classical
Confucian ethics and political theory.1 Early Rú 儒, or “Confucian,” texts,
especially those memorializing Kǒngzǐ (“Master Kǒng” or “Confucius”),
Mèngzǐ (“Master Mèng” or “Mencius”), and Xúnzǐ (“Master Xún”), develop
a set of responses to these questions that are powerful, subtle, and in certain
important respects very attractive even today. To begin to see why early Rú
ideas can help us, we need first to take stock of common conceptions of au-
thority, and learn to see these in relation to views of dependence.
Contemporary Westerners are heirs to a deeply conflicted heritage of
ideas about authority and personal freedom. The question of what makes an
authority legitimate has been intensely debated for several centuries in the
West, and with renewed vigor in political philosophy and associated fields
since the upheavals of the 1960s. Philosophical discussions of practical au-
thority from that time forward have generally been framed to address the
“anarchist challenge,” which questions the legitimacy of all governmental
authority, seeing it as an unjustified infringement on individuals’ autonomy.
This sort of root-and-branch rejection of authority often accompanies seem-
ingly progressive hopes for a liberated future without hierarchies of any kind.
But is it really possible, and desirable, to do without authority? Let me briefly
Aaron Stalnaker. Mastery, Dependence, and the Ethics of Authority, Oxford University Press
(2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190052300.001.0001
2 Mastery, Dependence, and the Ethics of Authority
point out some common but conflicting intuitions about different kinds of
authority.
Contemporary people readily accept the value and even necessity of
master teachers of skillful arts such as violin performance or playing bas-
ketball. When we want to learn to play the piano, for example, we arrange
to learn from an expert teacher of the art; we would rightly consider it mis-
guided to try to learn to play without such training. Similarly, most contem-
porary people would, upon reflection, agree that children need good parents
or parent-surrogates to raise them, and in the process exercise some forms of
authority over them.
For adults, however, the positive value, and perhaps necessity, of various
forms of authority is more controversial. For example, many are more suspi-
cious of the idea that there might be ethical experts who are genuinely wiser
than the rest of us, better able to live life well. This idea seems anathema to
contemporary convictions that all people are morally equal, especially if such
experts may claim more respect or power than others. If such ethical “mas-
ters” exist, what teaching roles they might play in human development, if any,
is the subject of profound controversy and much principled skepticism. If
ethical experts were to try to teach someone else how to be good, would that
not override the student’s own judgment at times and thus threaten his or her
moral autonomy? This dissonance leads to serious questions. In what ways
might people need to depend on others to learn about and cultivate virtue?
What role does autonomy play in such personal formation, both as goal and
as means?
A set of concerns parallel to those just mentioned about ethical experts can
also be raised concerning those involved in the world of politics. Just as there
is principled skepticism regarding ethical expertise, there is widespread skep-
ticism regarding the existence of political experts, by which I mean people
who actually are much better than the rest of us at leading social groups and
exercising executive authority.2 Westerners generally find that Lord Acton’s
pithy 1887 thesis, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts ab-
solutely,” expresses an obvious truth.3 As a matter of democratic prudence
we should therefore expect anyone who holds high office to be repeatedly
tempted to disintegrate morally, and thus corrupt whatever political exper-
tise they might once have possessed, gradually approximating the pseudo-
expertise of contemporary campaign consultants and “spin doctors” willing
to shill for anyone. On these premises, how one might actually become a wise
Paradoxes of Freedom 3
political leader begins to seem even more mysterious than how one might
become a good person.
The questions I raised at the beginning about authority and autonomy
are timely ones for contemporary Westerners, as well as perennial and uni-
versal issues of human social life. Historically speaking, many intellectuals
in the West (and elsewhere) understand themselves as heirs to the “flight
from authority” inaugurated by the Protestant Reformation and deepened
by the Enlightenment and associated political revolutions. And the social life
of Western democracies took a dramatic turn from the late 1960s forward,
as large numbers of young people rebelled against existing authorities and
the institutions that gave them power. A conservative backlash ensued in the
1980s, and the shape of that confrontation has continued to define American
politics in particular, for better and for worse. At the same time, economic
and social stratification has gradually increased to dramatic levels not seen
since the Gilded Age in the late nineteenth century.
Many factors have contributed to these trends, and they are not easy to
unravel. As the field of sociology has developed, it has arguably taken social
stratification, whether by class, race, gender, or other forms of status, as its pri-
mary focus.4 Understandably, sociologists tend to be skeptical of these forms
of status and wealth differentiation, often finding them to be unjustified—
in contrast to some economists and political thinkers. Defenders of wealth
inequalities often insist that what we now see are the natural results of free
and dynamic competition, in which there will always be winners and losers.
From either side, debate tends to hinge on ideas about human equality and
the nature of liberty, and how they ought to interact. Philosophical and re-
ligious thinkers have provided the egalitarian normative underpinnings of
both the sociological research program and the debate among social critics
about justice.
This study focuses on these fundamental normative presuppositions. In
this book I argue that an excessively narrow focus on coercive authority,
combined with unwarranted inferences from laudable commitments to
moral equality, have led contemporary thinkers astray on authority, depend-
ence, and social ethics more generally. We can do better, by refining our po-
litical and ethical commitments so that they might direct us away from the
paradoxes of coercive authority in a free society, toward more fine-grained
understandings of different forms of hierarchy, authority, and merit, as well
as of our dependence on and responsibility to each other. If we can more
precisely distinguish legitimate exercises of authority from objectionable
domination, we will be better able to evaluate and reform, where needed, a

wide range of current social practices structured by authority relations, in-
cluding government, academia, family life, and even the business world.
The rest of this chapter proceeds as follows. In section 1.2 I briefly discuss
the intellectual history of the modern transformation of authority alluded
to earlier, in order to suggest the deep roots of contemporary convictions.
In section 1.3, I begin to engage contemporary debates about autonomy
and authority, drawing on liberal, republican, and feminist analyses. There
I examine how the tendency to understand universal human dignity as con-
ferred by individual autonomy is often used to justify the politics of anti-
domination that structure many discussions of political authority. (I return
to these issues in greater depth in section 7.3.)
Recent analysts almost always understand such authority, to borrow Max
Weber’s concept, as Herrschaft, or “imperative control”: the socially legiti-
mated power to command obedience, correlated with a duty requiring
subjects of that authority to obey (Weber 1947, 152). Given our liberal and
democratic heritage, such authority generally appears suspicious, something
to be limited as much as possible.
The legal and political philosopher Joseph Raz has articulated the most in-
fluential contemporary philosophical analysis of authority in this sense. I ad-
dress his theory and the debates it has spawned, in part because it is in many
ways an incisive discussion of the subject, and in part because it shows how
relevant, and in certain key respects distinctive, are early Confucian analyses
of authority and its relation to autonomy.
We can see the distinctiveness of Confucian views in two main areas: first,
they reject the idea that submission to authority is automatically threatening
to individual autonomy; instead, they think submitting to the right sort
of authority in the right way is the best path to cultivating autonomy. And
second, they insist that the human condition is one marked by numerous
interacting forms of dependence, which are not only ineradicable, but in
many ways good. On a classical Confucian view, it is natural, healthy, and
good for people to be deeply dependent on others in a variety of ways across
the full human life span. Fully unpacking these points will take some time,
and will require care to avoid falling into common conceptual confusions be-
tween differing senses of “authority,” “dependence,” and “autonomy,” among
other key ideas.
After addressing authority as imperative control, and sketching the
contours of current debates over legitimate authority, this chapter moves
on to less familiar territory. In section 1.4 I summarize and discuss the

implications of historians’ work on the history of dependence in the modern
West to add needed nuance to intellectual historical discussions of changing
ideas about authority over this period. And in section 1.5 I discuss the reso-
lute anti-paternalism of thinkers like J. S. Mill and Isaiah Berlin, whose ideas
have done much to provide intellectual cover for a libertarian agenda that
seeks to minimize state support for cultivating “positive freedom” or capa-
bilities among the general populace. With these preparatory analyses of the
current state of debate in place, I close the chapter with a preview of what
contemporary Westerners should learn from the early Confucians about au-
thority, dependence, and the cultivation of autonomy in every citizen, to be
developed over subsequent chapters.
I expect some readers will be growing increasingly impatient with my
apparent acceptance and even advocacy of authority and dependence, and
my remarks on the potentially problematic implications of certain ways of
asserting human moral equality. Just what am I arguing for here? And why
rehabilitate the oppressive term “master”? Let me address the second issue
about mastery in order to prepare a clear response to the more general ques-
tion of normative aims.
The word “master” has a bad odor today. For example, it has become du-
bious or even unacceptable to continue using “master” to name the leader
of a residential college (i.e., a dormitory) at Harvard and Yale, a twentieth-
century American title that mimicked older British conventions regarding
heads of colleges at Oxford and Cambridge.5 The moral horror motivating
these changes is slavery, with its dreadful aftereffects continuing in American
civic life, and critics of the word hear echoes of the title of slave “master”
that attached to owners of enslaved people. Slavery obviously is as much an
abomination today as it has always been, whatever any particular commu-
nity decides about how to name administrative offices.
The word “master,” though, has a very long history, which spans the two
most relevant senses of authority addressed in this book, and also serves
as the most natural way in English to refer to becoming excellent at some
complex art or practice. It is thus precisely the word to use to raise the is-
sues this study engages. Descending from the Latin magister via the French
maistre, “master” has a deep and complex history, which ties together two
different but related ideas of authority: first, someone who controls some-
thing or some group of people through wielding effective power over it; and
second, someone who is a teacher, genuinely qualified to teach others. There
are many variations, including numerous traditional titles for various offices,
and the name for the most common graduate degree. The most crucial sense
of the word, for this project, is the idea of mastering an art or craft through
long study and practice.6 It is most crucial because mastery in this sense
turns out to be the central paradigm for Confucian conceptions of virtue
and, thus, as we shall see, practical authority. The early Rú also systematically
relate their ideas about virtuous mastery to actual political authority, held by
those in powerful governmental offices. Thus the double meaning captures
their range of interest in and analysis of authority, and appropriately signals
the themes of this study.
My overarching goal in this book is to articulate what I think contempo-
rary Westerners need to learn from early Confucians regarding authority,
dependence, and the cultivation of autonomy. I am not trying to develop a
form of “new Confucianism,” nor am I trying (ludicrously) to offer advice to
East Asians about how they should reform their governments or even their
cultures. I do view early Rú thinkers as equivalent in intellectual significance
to classical Western figures like Aristotle and Augustine, and thus see them
as worthy of engagement as potential sources of theoretical insight. This is
all the more true because of contemporary Western ethicists’ and political
theorists’ relative unfamiliarity with their ideas. In other words, I view them
as wise but far from perfect interlocutors, worthy of great respect and atten-
tion, but do not see them as infallible authorities—because there are no infal-
lible human authorities.
The early Rú do not share modern Western commitments to egalitari-
anism, but they have a much stronger sense of universal human moral and
intellectual potential than thinkers like Plato and Aristotle (Munro 1969).
They also articulate their ethical and political ideas in a more obviously ge-
neric and universal form, addressed to all human beings who must live to-
gether in communities, and indeed in large, bureaucratically run states. If
modern thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Bernard Williams, Alasdair
MacIntyre, and Martha Nussbaum can rehabilitate key themes from the an-
cient Greek and Roman philosophers in new forms, the early Chinese polit-
ical and ethical theories this study engages represent a comparatively easy
lift, despite the greater linguistic differences from English. (In c hapter 2 I ad-
dress more fully just how different from our own ideas early Chinese thought
and culture should be seen to be.)
Broadly speaking, I hope this study will contribute to more widespread
interest in what I consider powerful and attractive Confucian ideas. I aim to
help contemporary Westerners untie some of the intellectual knots regarding

authority and especially obedience that have kept us from properly grasping
the real failings in Enlightenment-inspired political and ethical theories,
without sliding into unjustified reactionary authoritarianism, or defeatist
Romantic yearning for a lost haven of meaningful, integrated community
life. And at the most substantive level I aim to contribute to what has come
to be called liberal or moderate “perfectionism,” in work by thinkers such as
Vinit Haksar, Joseph Raz, Thomas Hurka, George Sher, and Steven Wall, re-
cently augmented by Confucian contributions from Stephen Angle, Joseph
Chan, and Sungmoon Kim. I also hope to contribute to contemporary fem-
inist reflection on dependence and its relation to autonomy and hierarchy,
building on work by Eva Feder Kittay, Martha Fineman, Jennifer Nedelsky,
and Nancy Folbre, among many others.
1.2. “From Status to Contract”: Myths and Histories

of Authority’s Decline
The history of modern Western religious and philosophical thought has often
been told as a set of related stories organized around one central theme: “the
flight from authority.” As Jeff Stout writes: “modern thought was born in a
crisis of authority, took shape in flight from authority, and aspired from the
start to autonomy from all traditional influence whatsoever” (1981, 3).7 The
rough outlines of this intellectual history are quite familiar and can be told
as the gradual triumph of empirical science over religious dogmatism; or,
more subtly, as the fragmentation of intellectual authority into a number of
disintegrated spheres or “disciplines,” separating out theology, philosophy,
and the natural and human sciences.
The intellectual history relies on a related story about social and especially
political changes that gradually secularized a number of realms that were
previously governed, at least in theory, by religious authorities. In brief, these
histories correlate dramatic changes in intellectual authorities with equally
dramatic changes in political authorities. In Europe, Protestant reformers
challenged the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy as corrupt, preferring
instead to submit to the authority of the Bible. For a variety of reasons, the
resulting conflicts between Protestants and Catholics were savage, aptly
described as the “wars of religion.” Struggling to arrive at a way to attain
public order and peace without relying on contested religious premises,
jurists such as Hugo Grotius updated the Christian tradition of theorizing

about the “natural law,” and ended up inventing the beginnings of secular
governance. Intense early modern disputes over who, if anyone, really had
a right to rule gradually led to a search for a basis for political order outside
of an alliance between religious leaders and supposedly noble kings. With
the advent of the Enlightenment, democratic political revolutions gradually
made increasingly real alternative forms of government, based at least nom-
inally on “the consent of the governed.” At the same time, in a roughly par-
allel set of maneuvers, moral philosophers attempted to provide intellectual
foundations for morality that would appeal to all rational beings, regardless
of their religious loyalties—the most influential traditions of this sort are
probably Kantianism and utilitarianism. These philosophies made human
moral equality a cardinal premise of rational morality.8
This history is long and complex, and obviously beyond the scope of this
chapter to address adequately. Moreover, it has been narrated quite ably by
many others. The point of this section and the next is, instead, to suggest
in general terms why modern Western debates about authority have been
structured in what has become their characteristic way: as debates focused
on who can legitimately demand compliance from others, backed up with
the coercive power of the legal system, often linked to a duty obliging those
others to obey the authority’s commands. Moreover, this authority to com-
mand obedience appears to threaten what many heirs to the Enlightenment
regard as the paramount human characteristic, the very ground of our equal
human dignity, that is, our rational autonomy. To outline how and why
these developments took this form, I will briefly discuss two landmarks of
intellectual history: a highly influential nineteenth-century account of what
makes modernity modern, provided by Henry Maine, and Isaiah Berlin’s al-
most equally influential account of “liberty” that reflects twentieth-century
thinking about the dangers of potentially oppressive government action,
even when pursued in the best interests of citizens.
Let us begin with Henry Maine’s (1866) Ancient Law: Its Connection
with the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas.9 Maine’s
book established the historical study of law as a worthwhile intellectual en-
deavor, and it was a classic version of world-spanning, evolutionarily in-
clined, nineteenth-century European comparative argument. Maine’s central
thesis was that human social history could be summarized as the move “from
status to contract,” with the invention of contractual relations and their at-
tendant legal and institutional support system being a distinctively modern
development. In contrast, “ancient law,” which mostly enumerated custom

from time immemorial, reflected a society based on the status of various per-
sons, such as wives, children, and slaves, within patriarchal households. Only
the father could enter into legal contracts; all others were unfree dependents
without the legal and property rights of the father. Maine’s key motif is
gradual emancipation: over time more and more social relations are con-
ceived on the model of a contract entered into freely by equal citizens under
the rule of law, and fewer relationships are defined by the status, with associ-
ated duties and prerogatives, of the parties involved.
In this account, autonomous agents who can own property, control their
own activity, and freely enter into binding contracts regarding, for example,
their own labor, become the modern norm. Other relations, such as slavery
or the dependence of wives on husbands, are marked as archaic. Maine
thereby demarcates the modern liberal realm of the public and contrasts it
with a private realm where ancient customs linger on, perhaps out of biolog-
ical necessity. This mapping of social life continues to capture central features
of the modern Western cultural imagination. A crucial consequence of these
developments is a sense that hierarchical relations are somehow strange and
questionable because they deviate from the model of autonomously chosen
agreements between equals.10 Such relations must apparently be based on ar-
chaic, “traditional” conceptions of status that we should be glad to have lost.
The primary remaining place for authority, in Maine’s scheme, is for the
orderly enforcement of contracts. (His was a history of law.) We thus need a
legal system, and political authorities empowered to execute and defend that
system, which itself ought to be premised on the equal autonomy of citizens.
The gradual expansion over time of who might count as a citizen only deep-
ened the hold of this basic conception of rightly ordered social life. But what is
the right scope for laws, and thus for governmental action generally? Should
it stick to enforcing contracts, and warding off crimes, or should it take var-
ious actions to support the autonomy of citizens? To address common views
of these questions, let us turn now to Isaiah Berlin.
Isaiah Berlin’s tremendously influential 1958 essay, “Two Concepts of
Liberty,” is a history of Western political theory, not law per se.11 But it crisply
captures and explains the enduring appeal of giving what he calls “negative”
liberty priority over a different conception, “positive” liberty. Regardless of
its erudition and sensitive, humane spirit, it is very much a document of the
Cold War, and seeks among other things to explain how Western rationalist
philosophy, including forms dedicated to the freedom of the individual, has in
practice ended up justifying and inspiring illiberal revolutionary movements

and even totalitarian regimes. It takes as its central topic the “greatest” of the
“dominant issues of our world”: “the open war that is being fought between
two systems of ideas which return different and conflicting answers to what
has long been the central question of politics—the question of obedience and
coercion” (Berlin 1997, 193). Berlin aims to provide an explanation of two
contending political visions, leading to two conflicting accounts of proper
political authority, conceived as the power to demand obedience and enforce
compliance through coercive state power.
Amid the profusion of different doctrines of freedom in Western thought,
Berlin discerns two primary types, “negative” and “positive.” Negative li-
berty is freedom from interference from others, including governmental rep-
resentatives, in the pursuit of one’s goals (194–95, 198–99; see also 202 n. 1
for caveats and details). Negative freedoms are rights to be left alone, of the
sort guaranteed in the American Bill of Rights. Positive liberty, by contrast,
is freedom to live as “one’s own master,” “conscious of myself as a thinking,
willing, active being, bearing responsibility for my choices and able to explain
them by reference to my own ideas and purposes” (203). Positive freedom,
then, is the capacity or power to live according to one’s own judgment, as a
rational agent choosing what to do, within the limits of what law permits and
what is actually possible in the natural world.
While these may not seem intrinsically distant from each other, Berlin
charts their divergence over time, particularly when paired with strong ra-
tionalist premises about the rational agency that positive freedom instantiates.
Positive freedom is a way of talking about self-realization through devel-
oping one’s own rational agency—i.e., “self mastery.” Berlin suggests that the
seemingly harmless metaphor of self-mastery, in the sense of self-control or
self-command, implies a contrast between a higher self, often identified with
reason, and a lower self that must be controlled or overcome, often identi-
fied with irrational impulse, desire, or passion. The “true” or “higher” self
may also “be conceived as something wider than the individual . . . as a so-
cial ‘whole’ of which the individual is an element or aspect: a tribe, a race, a
Church, a State” (204). When such a move is made, an individual’s own will
and choices can appear to be ignorant or misguided when in conflict with the
“collective, or ‘organic’ ” will of the larger social entity. Coercion of the back-
ward and recalcitrant starts to seem quite reasonable on these premises, since
it is done “for their own sake, in their, not my, interest” (204). And sometimes
authorities can even claim that those they are coercing have unconsciously
chosen what their rulers say is best, despite their expressed dissent. (We
might here imagine some Soviet apparatchik referring to the “unconscious”
wishes of recalcitrant peasants to join collective farms, when in fact they have
to be dragged to them by force.) Berlin comments: “This monstrous imper-
sonation, which consists in equating what X would choose if he were some-
thing he is not, or at least not yet, with what X actually seeks and chooses, is
at the heart of all political theories of self-realisation” (205). This is an ex-
traordinarily strong denunciation of political theories that aim to cultivate
citizens’ positive freedom, rather than simply protect their negative freedom
from encroachment. Do all such theories really center on lying about people’s
actual choices in comparison to their ideal or best choices? The answer is
clearly no, but to see why Berlin feels compelled to render this verdict on the
Western tradition of political theory, we should examine how he sees polit-
ical theory linked to theories of personal formation.
Berlin examines in some detail the way philosophical theories of self-
realization in the West have borne fruit over time. One strand he charts
is the Stoic “retreat to the inner citadel,” which consists in contracting the
frontiers of one’s personal “kingdom” in order to ward off vulnerability to
misfortune. Berlin thinks the characteristic modern form of this view is
Kant’s moral philosophy, in which the noumenal rational self struggles
to assert its (rational, autonomous) control of the self, against the “heter-
onomy” of “slavery to the passions” (206–12, 210). This line of thought,
Berlin argues, shows the inadequacy of defining negative liberty, as he
suggests J. S. Mill does, as “the ability to do what one wishes”—if one’s
wishes can be contracted or perhaps extinguished, “I am made free” (211).
“Ascetic self-denial may be a source of integrity or serenity and spiritual
strength, but it is difficult to see how it can be called an enlargement of li-
berty,” Berlin writes (211).
According to Berlin, European theories of rational self-realization actually
go much further than this: advocates of rational enlightenment including
Spinoza, Herder, Hegel, and Marx insist that “to understand the world is
to be freed” (214). Reason liberates us from error and frustration. Once we
see clearly, we will affirm what reason dictates and only that. Liberation by
reason, Berlin suggests, is “at the heart of many of the nationalist, communist,
authoritarian, and totalitarian creeds of our day” (216). Why is this? Because
a number of thinkers, including in addition Rousseau, Kant, and Fichte,
transform the originally individualist doctrine of rational self-direction into
a social doctrine, and seek to understand how a rational life is possible for
society as a whole, and not just for individuals. But rationalism in politics has
turned out very badly, according to Berlin.
Berlin argues that the two crucial premises for the various rationalist the-
ories of society are that all people are rational, and the universe is a rationally
ordered, harmonious whole. Thus, “all true solutions to all genuine problems
must be compatible: more than this, they must fit into a single whole; for this
is what is meant by calling them all rational and the universe harmonious”
(218; see also 225 for a good explicit summary of his argument). “So long as
each player recognises and plays the part set him by reason—the faculty that
understands his true nature and discerns his true ends—there can be no con-
flict. Each man will be a liberated, self-directed actor in the cosmic drama”
(218). All these rational ends must coincide:
The common assumption of these thinkers (and of many a schoolman be-

fore them and Jacobin and Communist after them) is that the rational ends
of our “true” natures must coincide, or be made to coincide, however vio-
lently our poor, ignorant, desire-ridden, passionate, empirical selves may
cry out against this process. Freedom is not freedom to do what is irra-
tional, or stupid, or wrong. To force empirical selves into the right pattern is
no tyranny, but liberation. (219)
Clearly, the metaphysical premises about the universe and human agency
are what license the rather amazing slide from “liberation” from bondage
in a recognizably objective social sense, to the creepy, Orwellian sense of
state-sanctioned thought control that Berlin rightly exposes and furiously
criticizes. This is a history of authority run amok.
What is most peculiar about this history is not that this sequence of
developments has occurred, but that Berlin and others should think such du-
bious premises accurately capture the value of positive freedom, and ration-
ally express what a commitment to its cultivation would require. This study
contends that different political arrangements can better support the wide-
spread cultivation of moral agency among citizens, supporting every person’s
positive freedom (i.e., capable, more or less virtuous agency) without thereby
threatening, much less obliterating, their negative liberty to be free from ob-
jectionable government coercion.12
Berlin himself remarks on the illogic of the steps involved, when
he considers what education amounts to on these rationalist premises
(223). But he nevertheless articulates a dreadful caricature of rational

education:
[Auguste] Comte put bluntly what had been implicit in the rationalist
theory of politics from its ancient Greek beginnings. There can, in prin-
ciple, be only one correct way of life; the wise lead it spontaneously, that
is why they are called wise. The unwise must be dragged towards it by all
the social means in the power of the wise; for why should demonstrable
error be suffered to survive and breed? The immature and untutored must
be made to say to themselves: “Only the truth liberates, and the only way in
which I can learn the truth is by doing blindly today, what you, who know it,
order me, or coerce me, to do, in the certain knowledge that only thus will
I arrive at your clear vision, and be free like you.” (223)
Berlin aims for this to horrify his readers, and succeeds, at least with this
reader. Yet surely this is a caricature. Against this, something more de-
serving of the name of liberal education, that is, education for the wise use of
freedom, is possible and in some places actual. It can even occur in publicly
funded institutions like my own university.
Berlin’s goal is to expose the intellectual temptations that led intelligent
people to espouse totalitarian creeds, to horrible effect. This is laudable.
But in the process he overshoots the mark, and unnecessarily denigrates
the possibility of state action to support individual autonomy. Late in the
essay he argues for the stark incompatibility of commitments to negative
and positive liberty (226–37). In a free or liberal society, he writes, no
power is absolute, only certain rights, “so that all men, whatever power
governs them, have an absolute right to refuse to behave inhumanly”; in
other words, individuals must have frontiers within which they are “invio-
lable” by others, including the state and any experts employed by the state
(236). Such a society must erect “some absolute barriers to the imposition
of one man’s will on another. The freedom of a society . . . is measured
by the strength of these barriers” (237). Effective guarantees of negative
freedom, in other words, are the essential backbone of a free society. He
concludes:
This is almost at the opposite pole from the purposes of those who believe
in liberty in the “positive”—self-directive—sense. The former [advocates
of negative liberty] want to curb authority as such. The latter want it placed
in their own hands. That is a cardinal issue. These are not two different
interpretations of a single concept, but two profoundly divergent and irrec-
oncilable attitudes to the ends of life. (237)
This badly overstates the case. Berlin presumes that authority must be coer-
cive, and therefore advocates of negative liberty are right to limit authority’s
reach as much as possible, especially with regard to certain inviolable areas
of personal choice. Anyone who thinks society or other people could actually
help citizens become better able to direct themselves, Berlin suggests here, is
a closet tyrant, seeking coercive power to force others to conform to their vi-
sion of the good life, whatever that may be.
The problem with this argument, oddly enough, is just as Berlin points
out: the advocates of positive freedom that he surveys make arguments
about society that are not sound (see, e.g., 220). Rationalist premises about
the harmony of the world and the harmony of human rational ends are false.
Berlin himself argues against them quite eloquently as he defends value
pluralism in the last section of the essay (237–42). Thus the implications
for rational agency that follow from such premises should not be an in-
trinsic concern. All of this adds up to an excellent demolition of political
theories based on rationalist metaphysics and/or dangerous conceptions of
the “collective will” of peoples. But that splendid critique hardly begins to
settle the questions raised by Enlightened and more generally liberal ideals
of autonomy.
For example, are human beings automatically autonomous, without any
education, so that all that they require is to be protected from gross abuses?
This vision is inadequate, despite its appeal in the wake of the intellectual his-
tory Berlin narrates, as well as the political history of tyrannical rule and to-
talitarianism he is responding to. Such a view of human beings camouflages
our reliance on each other even to become free and autonomous in any ro-
bust sense, as I hope to show. The politics of cultivating self-mastery in others
can go a way very different from the ones Berlin warned Europeans about in
1958. And yet intellectual discussions of authority often continue to proceed
on similar premises: authority is the power to coerce, or at best to rightfully
demand obedience to commands, all of which clashes regularly with indi-
vidual autonomy, and thus constantly threatens to spiral out of control into
domination. Let us now examine the concept of autonomy more closely, es-
pecially regarding its interactions with power and authority.
1.3. Autonomy, Domination,

and Legitimate Authority
A significant portion of the political and moral appeal of autonomy as an

ideal stems from the thought that domination of other human beings is
wrong and should be prohibited to the greatest extent possible; protecting
individual autonomy has seemed to many to be an essential, defining com-
ponent of struggles against oppression. Berlin’s history of political theory
is motivated by a similar moral impulse. Suspicion of domination has very
deep roots in the West, which are discernible in two large and complex his-
torical trends: the repeated debates over slavery, and the gradual growth of
the “social contract” tradition of political theorizing, which takes the autono-
mous household head as its basic unit.
The central place of slavery in classical Greek and Roman culture, in-
cluding the formative era of Christianity, is historically indisputable; this her-
itage was the backdrop for both the growth and gradual dismantling of the
modern transatlantic slave-based economy. Western thinking about subor-
dination, authority, and obedience has been deeply shaped both by defenses
of slavery as natural (drawing primarily on Aristotle) and divinely ordained
(drawing on Paul’s epistles and other biblical texts), and also by subsequent
criticisms of slavery as inhuman and evil.13 This heritage of debate pushes
analysis of authority toward what seems to Westerners to be the hard core of
politics: questions about coercion.
The social contract tradition served historically as a counterweight to con-
servative efforts to support slavery and other status-centered conceptions
of social life, and helps to explain the broad appeal of Maine’s narration of
modern legal history, as well as Berlin’s account of the history of political
theory. The social contract tradition is quite rich and complex.14 This va-
riety matters because only some conceptions of autonomy, such as Kant’s,
make strong contrasts between autonomy and “heteronomy” that can seem
to call into question any kind of obedience and submission as intrinsi-
cally degrading. Kant also roots his account of autonomy in equally strong
assumptions about human nature as defined and constituted by rational
agency, assumptions seen as true regardless of culture, history, individual
effort, or any other empirical factor. However, some sophisticated liberal
theorists, notably in the philosophy of education, have recognized that lib-
eral democracy itself constitutes a cultural tradition, with associated norms
and practices, which shape people and actively cultivate citizens’ habits of
autonomy, understood in various ways.15 Contemporary neo-republican

theorists such as Pettit (1997) and especially Gourevitch (2015) also explore
these issues fruitfully (I discuss these thinkers in section 7.3).
The basic idea of this work, with which I concur, is that becoming free and
autonomous is not spontaneous or necessary, but a project of human training
and formation that requires amazing investments of time, practice, energy,
and resources.16 Autonomy is, in other words, a project of self-mastery,
which partakes of a long tradition of practices of personal formation. (Berlin
was right about this aspect of “positive liberty.”) Such projects are almost in-
variably social, relying on teachers, guides, and a community of aspirants.
Thus, a defensible, sociologically and psychologically believable conception
of autonomy will recognize the crucial importance of formation and (I will
argue) even what might seem to be “paternalism” in the care and training of
aspiring autonomous agents.
To avoid misunderstanding, let me say a bit more about autonomy as it
is currently discussed. Autonomy is a complex and in certain respects am-
biguous notion, with a convoluted history.17 Autonomy in its most basic
sense refers to the capacity for self-government, and thus has core meanings
that refer to the human capacity for agency, self-control, and acting on the
basis of one’s own motives or reasons (rather than animal inclination, in
some versions). It thus draws on the long Western debate over the character
of the human will, and in particular its freedom.18 But this agent-centered
perspective is supplemented by a more social conception or aspect of au-
tonomy, which concerns freedom from external constraint or control, so
that someone may act according to his or her own judgment insofar as that
is possible in a given set of circumstances, rather than being compelled by
manipulative external forces in some way, leaving aside constraint by phys-
ical laws like gravity.19 I thus concur with Berlin that there are distinguish-
able senses of autonomy that reflect divergent strands in Western moral
and political thought, even if I want to part company with him and others
like him over the dangers of cultivating positive liberty, or autonomy in the
agent-centered sense.
Individual autonomy as a political value is central to liberal and demo-
cratic political theory and to the full range of social contract theories. As
I argue in subsequent chapters, the early Rú are quite concerned with the cul-
tivation of personal autonomy in the sense of developing wise judgment, self-
control, and good, virtuous character, but cash this out socially in ways that
differ strikingly from the liberalism of J. S. Mill or John Rawls, for example.
In particular, there is an ironic twist to their views: the way to cultivate mas-
tery of oneself is precisely through thoughtful and attentive submission to
one’s parents, older siblings, teachers, and in some cases political rulers, and
the point of politics is to facilitate the cultivation of human agency insofar as
that contributes to social flourishing. But as I show in the more detailed parts
of this study, this cultivation is nothing like the horrible thought control
Berlin imagines, and the forms of authority involved do not primarily con-
cern, seek, or require coercion or the power to demand obedience for their
proper functioning. Indeed, this aspect of early Confucian views led to harsh
criticism from some of their intellectual opponents, who described them as
“vermin” precisely because they thought Rú ideas endangered reliable chains
of command (see c hapter 2 for further discussion).
This Confucian conception of the potential for government action to
create supportive conditions for and even contribute directly to the cultiva-
tion of autonomy among state subjects is rather different from the views of
many liberal thinkers, who are generally closer to Berlin’s preference for neg-
ative liberty above all. A more typical liberal or libertarian model would be
to claim that humans are rational, autonomous creatures by nature, and that
this rational, autonomous agency confers on us a moral dignity that must
not be infringed—and which thus requires legal and even constitutional
protections, for freedom of conscience, freedom of assembly, and immunity
from various sorts of government searches and seizures, unjust trials or pun-
ishment, etc. In other words, human autonomy warrants freedom from egre-
gious forms of coercive control, and the primary debate among advocates of
this sort of view concerns what sorts of government action might count as
autonomy-threatening.
There are a number of contemporary strands of reflection about autonomy
that are relevant to these issues, and to the proper interpretation of analogous
Rú ideas. These often take the form of criticisms of liberal ideas. Feminist
theorists of “relational autonomy” are in some ways the most natural contem-
porary allies for the Confucian account I develop in later chapters (if we re-
vise some Rú views to address contemporary realities and convictions). John
Christman suggests that “ ‘Relational autonomy’ is the label that has been
given to the conception of what it means to be a free, self-governing agent
who is also socially constituted and who possibly defines her basic value
commitments in terms of interpersonal relations and mutual dependen-
cies” (2009, 164–65). Republican theorists of freedom as “non-domination”
are also relevant to Confucian attempts to differentiate between proper and
illegitimate relations and exercises of authority, in part because republicans

such as Pettit (1997) see state action as potentially protective of liberty, and
not always an infringement on it. Nevertheless, in this section I want first to
explore a different analysis of the relations between freedom and authority,
because it helps set up the Confucian materials with exceptional clarity, and
addresses the strongest criticisms of coercive authority directly. I address all
of these contemporary discussions in more depth in section 7.3, after more
fully examining Confucian views.
The philosopher of law Joseph Raz has produced a rigorous and highly
influential analysis of authority. Raz takes up the gauntlet of the “flight
from authority” I have sketched, addressing his account to an anarchist
skeptical of all governmental and legal authority, conceived of as liberals
and libertarians do: as the power to command correlated with a duty to
obey, backed up by the power of the state and legal system to coerce com-
pliance. Raz aims to show the possible legitimacy of legal authority and
the rule of law in a liberal society, even by the most stringent and sus-
picious standards, to those who are most jealous to guard the rational
autonomy of citizens. The moral point of his project is to distinguish be-
tween legitimate, lawful authority and its actions on the one hand, and
illegitimate, tyrannical domination on the other. And as noted earlier in
this chapter, Raz and subsequent thinkers in the same vein have charted
what seems to me to be a congenial path forward in political and moral
theory, toward a form of liberal “perfectionism” that protects individual
autonomy and defangs concerns about the perils of cultivating positive li-
berty. Delving more deeply into his views and the debates about their co-
gency also helps set the stage for subsequent analysis of Confucian ideas
in these areas.
To set up his inquiry Raz distinguishes between authority and power.
Intellectual authorities are “expert[s]‌who can vouch for the reliability of
particular information” (Raz 1990, 2). Political authority is more specifi-
cally “a right to command” (2).20 Power may be understood as the ability to
coerce compliance with one’s directives, without the question of legitimacy
even arising, whether through threats of force or actually applying force to
the recalcitrant. (The paradigm throughout Raz’s and similar discussions is
modern state power, exercised via a legal system backed up by a relative mo-
nopoly on violence.) But authority hinges on legitimacy: “Legitimate author-
ities are there by right. They have the right to act as authorities. Mere de facto
authorities do not, but they claim such right” (3).
We thus have a spectrum of practical authorities. Practical authority

simpliciter is the legitimate right to command others within some sphere.
De facto authorities possess the power to enforce compliance, but are not
legitimate; however, they claim legitimacy, which in effect makes them “go
through the motions” of legitimacy, which in turn usually induces their
subjects to “go through the motions” of obedience, at least to some degree.
Mere power does not even bother with this, but simply gives orders, and
punishes disobedience; subjects thus respond with prudential fear, and some
mix of compliance and defiance.
This is an apt way to parse the most general issues, and reflects common
modes of social analysis.21 For example, Raz’s “right to command” captures
the central idea of Max Weber’s influential definition of authority as “im-
perative control,” which Weber defines objectively as “the probability that a
command with a given specific content will be obeyed by a given group of
persons” (1947, 152). While this might seem like an index of power alone,
Weber’s fuller analysis makes clear that “every true relation of imperative
control” has “a certain minimum of voluntary submission; thus an interest
(based on ulterior motives or genuine acceptance) in obedience” (324). This
will involve various psychological and social mechanisms and forces, Weber
thinks, but will always include a “belief in legitimacy,” and every system
of authority will attempt to establish and cultivate such a belief in those it
rules (325). Voluntary submission and obedience is essential, whatever its
basis—and Weber famously specifies three main types of legitimate au-
thority: bureaucratic, traditional, and charismatic (324–92). More recent
social scientific analyses of authority such as Lincoln (1994) generally share
these premises.
The distinction Raz draws between practical and intellectual authority
is also common in the philosophical and legal literature on authority.
Intellectual authorities provide expert guidance on what to believe in areas
where the truth is obscure to the untrained, whereas practical authorities
issue commands that direct others’ actions. Note that intellectual authorities
do not have the power to command—they simply advise, and we have reason
to trust them because of their relevant expertise. Thus a doctor may advise us
about possible effective treatments for a disease, or a mechanic may advise
us about how to fix our car, but we are not under any obligation to actually
follow their advice; it would simply be prudent to do so, presuming they are
right in their assessments, and there are no countervailing factors relevant
to the overall question of what to do (such as lacking the funds to pay for
medical procedures). Nevertheless, part of what makes Raz’s account pow-

erful, and relevant to Confucian views on these issues, is the close connection
he sees between intellectual and practical authority. He writes, “I believe that
the primary arguments in support of political authority rely on its expertise
(or that of its policy-making advisers) and on its ability to secure social coor-
dination” (1990, 6). As we shall see, this is very close to the early Confucian
views that are the subject of this study.22
The form of Raz’s general inquiry is to ask the question: how could such
power to command, that is, to demand willing obedience, ever be legitimate?
This question has been put most strongly by philosophical anarchists writing
since the social upheavals of the 1960s—and their answer is that such power
can never be legitimate, so there is no such thing as authority, only power in
various guises.
The “anarchist challenge” fundamentally challenges the duty to obey the
ruler (Wolff 1970, excerpted in Raz 1990). Raz explains and summarizes:
The duty to obey conveys an abdication of autonomy, that is, of the right
and duty to be responsible for one’s action and to conduct oneself in the best
light of reason. If there is an authority which is legitimate, then its subjects
are duty bound to obey it whether they agree with it or not. Such a duty is
inconsistent with autonomy, with the right and the duty to act responsibly,
in the light of reason. Hence, Wolff ’s denial of the moral possibility of legit-
imate authority. (1990, 4)
The anarchist argues that humans are not just potentially autonomous; we
have a duty to act autonomously at all times, according to our own best
judgment—and claims this is incompatible with following commands we
disagree with.
Raz responds to this challenge by articulating what he calls the “service
conception of authority” (1986, esp. 38–69; 2006).23 The basic idea is that a
practical authority can only issue directives that are actually in the service of
those to whom they are addressed—that is, practical authorities help their
subjects wisely choose the right thing to do in some situation, all things con-
sidered. Legitimate authorities do not get to command just anything on this
account. They must command subjects to do what is actually right, or at least
closer to right than what the subjects could achieve on their own.
Raz’s “normal justification thesis” claims that “the normal way to estab-
lish that a person has authority over another person involves showing that
the alleged subject is likely better to comply with reasons which apply to him
(other than the alleged authoritative directives) if he accepts the directives
of the alleged authority as . . . binding” and tries to follow them, rather than
figuring out what to do on his or her own (1986, 53). While one may comply
with directives for a variety of reasons, the normal and normative reason for
accepting someone as an authority is this one, Raz thinks—in other words,
trusting that following someone’s directive will lead one do the right thing in
the situation.
The service conception of authority is still deeply shaped by the anarchist
challenge to authority, and mostly accepts it as valid, as can be seen by Raz’s
suggestion of another thesis that comes close to being a sufficient condition
for legitimate authority, which he calls the “independence condition” (2006,
1014–16). This states that authoritative directives are only possible when
“it is better to conform to reason [i.e., to get the decision right] than to de-
cide for oneself [what to do], unaided by authority” (1014). In other words,
Raz recognizes that there are some areas of life in which it is better to have
made the relevant choices oneself, for example in the choice of one’s spouse,
or in cases of childhood development when it is crucial to make one’s own
mistakes and learn from them, than to have conformed to right reason per se
(1015–16). This is admittedly somewhat vague, since it does not specify how
much or which areas of a flourishing human life require such “independent”
choosing—it simply recognizes that personal autonomy in this sense is an
important value and tends to oppose the very possibility of authoritative in-
tervention and direction.
But Raz also argues that the anarchist challenge is exaggerated, because it
in effect wants to extend the independence condition to the whole of life, so
that one must think for oneself about what to do on absolutely any question
at any time (1990, 12). Raz rightly objects, “Surely responsibility for one’s life
does not require continuously deciding for oneself on every aspect of one’s
affairs” (12). It must be acceptable to entrust one’s taxes to an accountant,
to follow the educational advice of teachers with regard to one’s children’s
schooling, to let others plan a family vacation, etc. Letting others, including
competent experts, handle some aspects of one’s life frees one up to con-
centrate on “those aspects of one’s life for which one has better aptitude” or
more interest (12). Such relationships of cooperation and trust are not crimes
against autonomy or personal responsibility.
Nevertheless, Raz’s service conception still accepts the basic framing of the
issues common to anarchists and most philosophers of law: authority means
the right to command, correlated with a duty to obey, which suspends and
overrides the judgment of a legitimate directive’s recipient. While Raz may
have saved moral room for such authority despite the value and claims of
autonomy, he in the end also preserves their fundamental conflict. This is
true despite the fact that legitimate authority, on his account, aims where
the recipient’s own autonomous judgment should also aim, at doing what
is right.
Raz’s account has been the subject of much discussion, both supportive
and critical. I concentrate here on the most relevant criticisms. One family
of objections may be called “proceduralist,” and suggest that authorities have
many other roles to play than getting subjects to conform to right reason and
make the perfectly suitable decision. Especially in a democracy, our decision
procedures, which aim to include all citizens in collective decision-making,
may be more important than the actual success of the decisions reached.
Thus democratic authorities aim not primarily at making perfectly rational
decisions, but instead at representing the predominant will of the people, or
fairly arbitrating disputes between citizens, or something similar (Hershovitz
2011, 3–6).
Stephen Darwall (2009) has articulated a powerful criticism of Raz’s
theory on the central point, suggesting that Raz’s arguments and hypothet-
ical cases show neither a right to rule nor an obligation to obey. Darwall
develops one of Raz’s examples, that of John, “an expert on Chinese cooking,”
who is so skilled that anyone who aimed to cook an excellent Chinese meal
should follow his directions, if he were available to provide them (Raz 1986,
64; Darwall 2009, 151). But if we imagine someone named Sara who in some
situation has no reason to do anything other than prepare the best Chinese
meal, John’s expertise would at best give her reasons to act as if John had au-
thority over her, and thus follow his directions—but this still does not give
John a right to her obedience, nor does it give Sara a duty to obey him, such
that she would rightly be blameworthy if she failed to heed his directives.24
In other words, it would be foolish of Sara to go against John’s directions, but
not wrong. She does not owe him obedience; she simply has ample reason to
heed his advice and act accordingly. Similarly, John’s superior expertise does
not give him the right to order her around in the kitchen, even if she aims to
produce a Chinese meal, his métier. There must be something other than a
differential in expertise to explain the special relationship that obtains be-
tween someone who has the right to rule and someone else with a correlated
obligation to obey.25
Scott Hershovitz (2011) has approached these issues from the opposite
direction, suggesting that Raz’s account indiscriminately licenses too many
authorities, and so cannot be right as it stands. Consider the authority of
parents over their children. If we ask why a mother has authority over her
ten-year-old child, we “might be tempted to give a Razian answer: She knows
better” (12). But this licenses too many authorities. Almost any mature adult
would have sufficient competency to be better able to guide the child than
she could herself, thus fulfilling Raz’s criteria. But this is clearly not right;
only one or two adults typically have parental rights to obedience from any
given child, on the grounds of their specific parent-child relationship. As
Hershovitz points out, “if several people are able to play a role, we need a
method of choosing among them” (12). And consider again the example of
the expert cook: if John were to wander into a poorly run Chinese restaurant,
recognize the problems with the food, and barge into the kitchen, barking
orders at the inexpert cooks he finds, he would not have a right to command,
nor they a duty to obey, despite his greater expertise. It is simply not his place
to do so, because he does not work in the restaurant, nor does he own it. But if
he were the executive chef in a Chinese restaurant, and Sara were a line cook
in that same restaurant, he would have authority over her, perhaps because
of their relationship, or her agreement to work there, or both (Hershovitz
2011, 17, 15). As Hershovitz argues, authority is embedded in roles that form
relationships, which are themselves embedded in practices that justify the
authority relations involved, if they are justified at all.
I return to these issues in c hapter 7, but for now let us take stock. Despite
my focus on criticisms of Raz’s service conception of authority, many have
been attracted by the theory, because of its central insights: greater expertise,
including abilities to order communities and solve coordination problems,
does seem to make possible a legitimate relation of authority, wherein the
authority directs those subject to him or her according to what they really
should do, all things considered, which quite reasonably engenders the sort
of trust from subordinates that defines authority relations. In other words,
many have found Raz’s basic answers to the questions of who may serve as
an authority, and why, to be convincing in general, even if there may be sig-
nificant problems in the details, or the account is incomplete. Even if such
relations do not necessarily license either a right to command or an obliga-
tion to obey, as Darwall and others argue, they might still form an impor-
tant paradigm of just authority relations, however such rights and duties
might be established through further argument. Moreover, Hershovitz’s
focus on the specifics of roles embedded in relationships, which are shaped

by and contribute to practices that make important human goods possible,
turns out to be a pregnant if somewhat vague set of recommendations. As
it turns out, early Confucian social and ethical theory took up a version of
this line of argument long ago, and my reconstruction of these ideas in sub-
sequent chapters will, I hope, suggest that the ideas are powerful enough to
be worth careful consideration today as we struggle to understand different
varieties of authority, and the various forms of dependence intrinsic to such
relationships.
Before forecasting the main lines of the early Confucian analysis of au-
thority relations, however, we need first to set the stage more fully, by
reappraising the history of modern thought about autonomy and its political
and ethical value. We need to look again at the past narrated by Henry Maine
and Isaiah Berlin, but this time more explicitly from the “underside,” as it
were, by focusing on the history of relations of dependence.26 Once we un-
derstand the downfall and systematic pathologization of dependence more
clearly, we will be in better position to reconsider the way authority relations
have typically been analyzed and evaluated in recent academic discourse,
and also to perceive the value of an encounter with early Confucian thought
on these themes.
1.4. Transformations of “Dependence” in

the Modern West
“Dependence” and “dependency” are ambiguous and often vague

concepts, which have developed deeply unsavory connotations of la-
ziness, submissiveness, and dysfunction in contemporary social and
political discourse, particularly in the United States over the last fifty
years. To better grasp the early Confucian conceptions I examine in this
study, as well as likely sources of resistance to their ideas, it behooves
us to (1) scan the history of these ideas in the modern West, in order to
uncover the roots of contemporary fears and presumptions about de-
pendence; (2) analyze differing senses of dependence that are poten-
tially relevant to ethical and political reflection; and (3) relate early Rú
conceptions of these matters to insightful contemporary discussions, in
order to specify more clearly similarities and differences between var-
ious ways of approaching dependence. Only in this way can we come
to appreciate the relative distinctiveness of early Rú ideas about human

interdependence.
The philosopher Nancy Fraser and historian Linda Gordon have co-
written a brief but insightful overview of the history of “dependency” as a
concept in the Anglo-American world, particularly focusing on the United
States ([1994] 2002). They distinguish three broad phases in the history of
the concept and its applications to society: a “pre-industrial” phase, roughly
referring to predominant social relations and understandings before 1750
(but extending in important respects well into the nineteenth century);
an “industrial” phase that covers the rise of industrial capitalism and de-
cline of competing legal and economic forms of life, roughly spanning the
years between 1750 and 1970; and a “post-industrial” phase that describes
understandings of “dependency” in the more or less contemporary United
States, from 1970 to the present. While there is a chronological basis to the
changes they chart, these “phases” also function as ideal types, with differing
characteristic structures and understandings of dependence that overlap at
various points over the broad sweep of time they aim to cover. Needless to
say, my discussion of their broad historical argument is far from sufficient
or adequate as a history of “dependence” in the United States, let alone the
entire modern West. I offer it here to prepare for further analysis of differing
forms of dependence.
Fraser and Gordon helpfully distinguish different “registers of meaning”
for “dependence” and its cognates. The root meaning of the term refers to a
physical relation in which one thing hangs suspended from another, but its
metaphorical usage stretches across several aspects of human social rela-
tions. The first register is economic, in which someone depends on another
person or institution for subsistence or other economic support. Other
registers are (2) social, referring to status hierarchies of various sorts and
the particular forms of respect and expectations that accompany different
statuses; and (3) legal, referring particularly to one’s legal status, which may
be formally equal to others, or may, as in the widespread pre-industrial
practice of coverture, be subsumed within or beneath the legal status of
the male head of a household. Other common differentiated forms of legal
status have included indentured servitude, more or less permanent slavery,
and the statuses of immigrants, colonial natives, and “minor” children.27
The fourth register is political: “here dependency means subjection to an
external ruling power” and may apply to colonies or to subject castes of
noncitizen residents. The fifth register, which steadily grows in importance
over time, is what they call “moral/psychological,” referring to supposed

character traits of neediness, submissiveness, or lack of willpower (Fraser
and Gordon [1994] 2002, 16).
In preindustrial society, dependence meant general subordination, in
which the economic, social, legal, and political registers were undiffer-
entiated. This reflected a society in which these various possible modes
of hierarchy were generally fused. The moral/psychological sense that
would later develop “barely existed” at this time (17). In this sort of so-
ciety everyone below the reigning monarch was subordinate to various
others and incurred no stigma from such subordination, although there
were certainly variations in honor between different status holders. People
considered it right and natural that society consisted of nested relations
of dependence. Dependency was thus normal, not deviant, and was a so-
cial rather than individual trait, and carried no “moral opprobrium” (17).
Pejorative uses of “dependency” do not appear before the twentieth cen-
tury; earlier uses tended to stress trusting and relying on others, as in
today’s “dependable.”
In the seventeenth century, “independence” was only applied to aggregate
entities like congregations or nations, but by the eighteenth century “an in-
dividual could be said to have an independency, meaning an ownership of
property, a fortune that made it possible to live without laboring,” as in the
contemporary expression “independently wealthy” (17). The vast majority of
people, however, had to work for others, and their identity was bound up in
the “head” of whatever household they were part of. Accordingly, eighteenth-
and many nineteenth-century discussions of representative government pre-
sume that significant property ownership is a prerequisite for political rights,
leaving most people still in subordinate, dependent positions. Most people
lived lives of “multiple layers of dependency,” and women’s and children’s
labor were just as essential to household and family economies as men’s labor
(16–18). Fraser and Gordon write:
Before the rise of capitalism, all forms of work were woven into a net of de-
pendencies, which constituted a single, continuous fabric of social hierar-
chies. The whole set of relations was constrained by moral understandings
[of reciprocal obligations]. . . . In the patriarchal families and communities
that characterized the preindustrial period, women were subordinated and
their labor often controlled by others, but their labor was visible, under-
stood, and valued. (33; see also 23)
Even the “independence” of rich landowning families was circumscribed

and enmeshed in this broader social system, governed by widely understood
conceptions of reciprocal obligations between people (23).
Fraser and Gordon argue convincingly that the rise of industrial society
from roughly 1750 to 1970 led to significant changes in both discourse and
practice concerning dependence, setting in motion deep, albeit gradual
changes in conceptions of proper human social life (18–22). At the most ge-
neral level, the “preindustrial unity” of different modes of dependence within
society broke apart as the various different registers of dependence became
disaggregated and developed along diverging trajectories (19). The ever-
increasing power of industrial capitalism within Western social life over the
eighteenth to twentieth centuries, combined with accompanying changes in
religious, philosophical, and political ideas about proper and improper gov-
ernment, labor, and family life, all combined to transform conceptions of de-
pendence and independence.
Viewed from a distance, this period witnessed a shocking reversal in ideas
about proper political and economic dependence in particular. As Fraser
and Gordon write, “What in preindustrial society had been a normal and
unstigmatized condition became deviant and stigmatized. More precisely,
certain dependencies became shameful while others were deemed nat-
ural and proper” (18). Drawing on radical elements of Protestant thought
in particular, social and political reformers rejected many previously cel-
ebrated forms of hierarchy and authority. From the English Civil War to
the revolutions in the United States and France, among other attempts,
revolutionaries claimed political independence from monarchs and co-
lonial overlords. Dissatisfied agitators created movements to abolish the
dominance of the Catholic Church and even state-supported churches;
to abolish the slave trade and eventually slavery itself; to defend the rights
of women to own property, have their own legal identity, and eventually to
vote; and to protect the rights of laborers to be free from certain egregious
abuses. Previously acceptable status hierarchies grew increasingly suspect,
and the increasingly attractive ideology of human moral equality generated
a fundamental problem: which existing relations of subordination should be
abolished, and which retained, on what grounds?
Henry Maine’s widely adopted conception of modernization as the move
“from status to contract,” discussed earlier, encapsulates the increasingly heg-
emonic intellectual status of contract-based conceptions of society during
the rise of modern industrial societies. The rightness of free contracting in
this sense, albeit with important exceptions, became the organizing basis
for sorting out different forms of hierarchy and dependence. On Fraser and
Gordon’s account, the paradigm of “independence” shifted over this period
from the independently wealthy noble landowner to the white workingman,
head of his family, freely contracting with business owners to labor for wages
(19). While some radicals rejected this arrangement as “wage slavery,” late
nineteenth-and early twentieth-century workers claimed a new kind of in-
dependence and dignity through paid work, and demands for civil and elec-
toral rights, as well as through unionization and labor rights agitation. This
culminated in the useful fiction of the “family wage,” which was supposed to
be “sufficient to maintain a household and to support a dependent wife and
children,” and which labor unions used with some success to demand higher
wages (19, 21). Independence thus came to describe those working diligently
for pay, as well as the self-employed and property owners. However, the so-
called family wage was in most cases insufficient to support a family single-
handedly, and this conception of wage labor as freely contracted by equals
“denied workers’ dependence on their employers, thereby veiling their status
as subordinates in a unit headed by someone else.” The hierarchical relation
between owner and workers was thus “mystified,” and the economic inde-
pendence of workingmen was “largely illusory and ideological” (22).28
This invention of a new form of putative “independence” through wage
labor led to a proliferation of alternative, relatively novel forms of depend-
ence to be contrasted with the white workingman. These alternatives often
included a much stronger element of “moral/psychological” dependence
than previous forms of dependency implied. The “pauper” did not work for
wages, but instead lived on charity given out as “poor relief.” Over time, the
pauper became an alternative character type, as well as a negative image of
the white workingman: he was not a subordinate within a productive system
of labor, but outside any such system. As Fraser and Gordon write, “Paupers
were not simply poor but degraded, their character corrupted and their will
sapped through reliance on charity” (20). Their complete economic depend-
ence on others had to be explained, generally in terms of character defects or
even biological unfitness.
Even more extreme were the figures of the colonial “native” and the “slave.”
Conquered natives and captured slaves (or their descendants) encapsulated a
pure form of political subjection, having no political rights or status of their
own. Simplifying many complex changes, Fraser and Gordon note a gradual
drift over time “from an older sense of dependency as a relation of subjection
imposed by an imperial power on an indigenous population to a newer sense

of dependency as an inherent property or character trait of the people so
subjected” (20). This again was a dramatic enlargement of the relatively novel
“moral/psychological” register of dependence. In other words, whereas up
through much of the eighteenth century colonials were dependent because
they had been conquered, in the nineteenth century colonials were con-
quered because they were intrinsically dependent, and could not effectively
govern themselves. As colonialism spread further in the nineteenth century
and associated predatory practices needed better justification, apologists
came to naturalize the dependence of slaves and natives, suggesting that
these populations were naturally “childlike” and submissive, and needed
to be ruled by Europeans for their own good. Racist theories provided the
justificatory cover needed to continue lucrative slavery-based economies in
direct contradiction to the rising tide of democratic thought, by excluding
inconvenient populations from the status of independent, equal citizens.
The third paradigmatic character contrasted with the white workingman
was the newly invented “housewife” (21). The idea of the family wage, how-
ever useful for labor forces agitating for better wages, implied that household
members such as the wife and children were “dependent” on support from
the male head of the household. The housewife merged women’s preindus-
trial social and legal dependency with their more pronounced economic de-
pendency in the industrial order. Wives’ economic contributions, while still
necessary to the vast majority of households, were submerged and hidden by
the rise of paid labor outside the home. And as workingmen gained political
rights while women did not, the result was to “feminize—and stigmatize—
sociolegal and political dependency” (21).
In sum, the rise of industrial capitalism shattered “dependency” into dif-
ferent forms or modes, and made some forms of dependency seem natural
and inevitable, while others appeared obnoxious and wrong. What appeared
suitable for dark-skinned people and women, because of their supposedly
submissive and weak psychologies, was unsuitable for wage-earning white
men. And economic subordination was transvalued: capital-labor relations
should be seen as free and morally blameless, fully compatible with the “in-
dependence” of both contracting parties, guarding especially the purported
independence of those doing the labor.
Fraser and Gordon note increasing efforts from 1890 to 1945, particularly
in the United States, both to help the needy and, particularly through govern-
ment action, to distinguish carefully between the deserving and undeserving
poor (22–25). The household dependence of wives and children on husbands/

fathers was widely seen as good, whereas dependence on charity was dubious
and increasingly bad—particularly because it was thought to reveal shameful
character defects, rather than bad luck or cyclical economic problems, even
during the Great Depression. Ironically, Progressive Era reformers tried
to substitute “dependency” for “pauperism” to reduce the stigma attached
to receiving aid, but this only served to stigmatize the new term (23–24).
Although many federal government programs carefully distinguished be-
tween the deserving and underserving, “the New Deal intensified the dis-
honor of receiving help by consolidating a two-track welfare system” (24).
One track, including unemployment and old-age insurance, was offered to
all affected people as an entitlement, without supervision or stigma, and thus
without any taint of “dependence” on the state. Second-track programs, most
notably what became Aid to Families with Dependent Children, “continued
the private charity tradition of searching out the deserving few among the
many chiselers” (24). Funded through general tax revenues, such programs
seemed to give recipients something for nothing, and included a remarkable
amount of state surveillance of recipients: “means-testing; morals-testing;
moral and household supervision; home visits; extremely low stipends—in
short, all the conditions associated with welfare dependency today” (24).
These families with dependent children but no father to depend on were
viewed as deviant, and the drafters of the relevant legislation aimed to make
this status dramatically less preferable to recipients than marriage (24). These
second-track programs thus policed the boundary between good and bad
dependence, enforcing the norm that households should be headed by wage-
earning fathers.
The conclusion of this narrative is all too familiar to contemporary
Americans. Fraser and Gordon argue that in the post-industrial United
States, from roughly 1970 to the present, “good” dependency has effectively
disappeared. The formal abolition of the legal and political dependencies
that were still pervasive in industrial society, through the extension of legal
rights to housewives, paupers, natives, and the descendants of slaves, reflects
the growing contemporary sense that political dependency is unaccept-
able. Moreover, the ideal of the family wage, and the conception of house-
hold order that underpinned it, has for the most part collapsed. Women have
entered the workforce in large numbers, and higher-paid manufacturing
jobs have dwindled while lower-paid service work has proliferated, fre-
quently necessitating that both parents of children work outside the home
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Mastery, Dependence, and the Ethics of

Authority Aaron Stalnaker

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

1. Paradoxes of Freedom: Modern Western Difficulties with

4.5. The Way as a Lifelong Path with Stages 151

I use the Pinyin system of Romanization throughout. Nevertheless, when

(http://​ctext.org/​liji), which is based on a version of the widely available Táng

domination, we will be better able to evaluate and reform, where needed, a

on to less familiar territory. In section 1.4 I summarize and discuss the

help contemporary Westerners untie some of the intellectual knots regarding

1.2. “From Status to Contract”: Myths and Histories

jurists such as Hugo Grotius updated the Christian tradition of theorizing

development. In contrast, “ancient law,” which mostly enumerated custom

practice ended up justifying and inspiring illiberal revolutionary movements

The common assumption of these thinkers (and of many a schoolman be-

(223). But he nevertheless articulates a dreadful caricature of rational

1.3. Autonomy, Domination,

A significant portion of the political and moral appeal of autonomy as an

autonomy, understood in various ways.15 Contemporary neo-​republican

illegitimate relations and exercises of authority, in part because republicans

We thus have a spectrum of practical authorities. Practical authority

medical procedures). Nevertheless, part of what makes Raz’s account pow-

focus on the specifics of roles embedded in relationships, which are shaped

1.4. Transformations of “Dependence” in

“Dependence” and “dependency” are ambiguous and often vague

to appreciate the relative distinctiveness of early Rú ideas about human

over time, is what they call “moral/​psychological,” referring to supposed

Even the “independence” of rich landowning families was circumscribed

imposed by an imperial power on an indigenous population to a newer sense

poor (22–​25). The household dependence of wives and children on husbands/​

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The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,

Section 4. Information about Donations to

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where

(http://ctext.org/liji), which is based on a version of the widely available Táng

autonomy, understood in various ways.15 Contemporary neo-republican

over time, is what they call “moral/psychological,” referring to supposed

poor (22–25). The household dependence of wives and children on husbands/