Chapter 2. Literature: Why Obey, and When to Stop

2.1Obedience from above: protection and decision

Hobbes's answer to the question why obey is the one most readers carry away from Leviathan: because without a common power life is war, and a power that keeps everyone in awe is the only way out of it. The fuller argument is read in Sections 4 to 6. Here it is enough to note that the answer is given from above. The subject obeys because the sovereign protects, and the sovereign is the judge of what protection requires.

Schmitt's Political Theology (1922) carries the view from above to its sharpest point. In four chapters it holds that the sovereign is the one who decides on the exception, the case no existing norm covers, which no legal norm can settle in advance; a legal order rests on a decision, and the normal situation it presupposes has to be made. Schmitt calls the exception a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state, and places the sovereign outside the normally valid legal order and yet within it, since it is the sovereign who decides whether the constitution is to be suspended as a whole (Schmitt 1922). Carl Schmitt served the Nazi regime from 1933, and critics read his theory of the exception in that light. Schmitt's account bears on this article's question in one respect only: the normal situation, on his account, has to be made, and it is the sovereign who decides on the exception; whether it still holds, as this article takes it, is then the sovereign's question too. Political Theology does not speak of the katechon.

A reading of the katechon itself shows the double face of protection from above. Esposito, in a chapter on the figure, reads it as the figure of immunity: it holds evil back by containing it, so that the protection keeps within it what it protects against (Esposito 2002). Cacciari treats the restraining power as ambiguous in a related way: in holding back the lawless one it also holds back the end and the coming the faithful await, and it can contain lawlessness only by taking some of it into itself (Cacciari 2013). The letter itself names what is held back as evil, "that man of sin", "the son of perdition" (2 Thessalonians 2:3), and says only that "he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way" (2:7). The reading that the holding delays every coming, good or bad, is Cacciari's and the study's extension, not the letter's.

2.2Obedience from below: acceptance and its zone

A second account starts from the person who receives an order. Barnard holds that authority lies in the acceptance of an order by those to whom it is addressed. A person accepts an order that is understood, consistent with the organisation's purpose and with personal interest, and possible to carry out; within a zone of indifference, orders are accepted without conscious question (Barnard 1938). Simon, studying administration as decision-making, holds that authority holds where a subordinate accepts a decision without examining its merits, within a zone of acceptance. An organisation shapes its members' decisions by setting their premises, through authority, communication, training, the criterion of efficiency and identification with the organisation, and people decide within limits: no one knows all the alternatives or foresees all the consequences (Simon 1947).

The two accounts differ from Hobbes's on where authority comes from. They share with it an interest in a boundary: the edge of the zone, past which an order is examined, or refused. Barnard's first condition is that the order be understood. That condition is a condition about sight, and it is close to the variable this article proposes. It concerns, however, an order that has been given. What happens when no order has been given and a person still acts as if one had is a question the summaries of Barnard and Simon available here do not take up.

2.3Obedience from procedure: legitimacy and fairness

A third account looks at why people comply with law in everyday life. Tyler, from a survey of people in Chicago, argues that people obey the law chiefly because they see the authorities as legitimate and their procedures as fair, which means being heard, neutrality and respectful treatment, more than from fear of sanctions or from the outcomes they receive (Tyler 1990). The contrast with Hobbes is plain. In chapter XIII, fear of death is the first passion that inclines people to peace; in Tyler's survey, fear of sanctions is not the main reason people obey.

Fuller adds, from the side of law's form, that law has an inner morality of eight requirements, told through a king, Rex, who fails at each in turn: there must be rules; they must be published, prospective, clear, consistent with one another, possible to obey and not changed too often; and official action must agree with the rules as declared (Fuller 1964). Publication is a requirement of visibility. Fuller's requirement concerns the rule, however, not the end of the obligation under it.

2.4Exit and voice

Hirschman's account is not about obedience in the first instance but about what members do when the organisation they belong to declines: they leave (exit) or speak up (voice), and loyalty holds exit back and makes voice more likely (Hirschman 1970). The terms are borrowed in Section 7 with care. Going home at the end of a working day is not leaving an organisation, and an employee unsure whether to go is not a member responding to decline. What the borrowing captures is narrower: a person who neither leaves nor asks is using neither exit nor voice, and loyalty, in Hirschman's sense, is what holds exit back.

One further work bears on voice. Edmondson finds that teams whose members believe it safe to take interpersonal risks speak up about errors and learn more (Edmondson 1999).

2.5The positions side by side

Its last column shows the gap. Only Barnard's condition of understanding and Fuller's requirement of publication say anything, on the summaries available, about what the person under an obligation must see, and neither addresses a restraint with no order and no published rule behind it.