Governing is concerned with rights, legitimacy, claims, and enforcement

# Governing is concerned with rights, legitimacy, claims, and enforcement At the end of the day, governing is about * Claims on rights * The legitimacy of those claims on rights * Enforcing claims on rights * Where rights come from (which makes them legitimate or no longer legitimate) In a [[Thomas Hobbes]]Ian state of nature, the only legitimate claims to rights are those that can be enforced through force. One branch of legal scholarship is all about how we moved away from this state, because any system of claims seems to have a cold-start problem for legitimacy. [[A Positive Account of Property Rights]] is one such explanation. [[The Dictator’s Handbook]] has another perspective on it. Over time, the source of rights has shifted between ancestral claims, to divine mandate, to just doing a good job, to inevitable historical forces, to some part of the population having inalienable rights that they can delegate. Medieval rulers were obsessed with *claims* to *rights* and the *legitimacy* of those claims. For example there might be a right to graze pigs in a forest - any lord can claim that right, but the legitimacy of the claim could be backed up by anything from the fact that he happened to have a bunch of guys with swords to hundreds of years of direct ancestors also holding that claim (who of course started with a bunch of guys with swords.) You can enforce a claim with zero legitimacy through raw violence but as soon as someone can beat you in a fight, you’re screwed. Legitimacy is what enabled someone to enforce a claim without resorting to raw violence. [[Patrick Wyman]] describes these situations well in tides of history. Interestingly, there is very little correlation between legitimacy of a claim, and some sort of utilitarian view of who could best use it. ### Related * [[General vs Identity Rules]] * [[The importance of libgen and scihub illigitimizes the law]] * [[Voting is a symbolic act of yielding claims to certain rights in a democratic system]]  [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Governing+is+concerned+with+rights,+legitimacy,+claims,+and+enforcement) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Governing+is+concerned+with+rights,+legitimacy,+claims,+and+enforcement)