6 Lucia M. Rafanelli Moreover, in Kant’s view, the moral importance of establishing and maintaining a state grounds a seemingly unconditional duty to obey it, regardless of how the state was established and what abuses the sovereign commits.28 Kant writes, ‘…a people cannot offer any resistance to the legislative head of a state which would be consistent with right, since a rightful condition is possible only by submission to its general legislative will.’29 Shortly thereafter, Kant explicitly invokes the importance of establishing and maintaining a state to justify this demanding duty to obey: The reason a people has a duty to put up with even what is held to be an unbearable abuse of supreme authority is that its resistance to the highest legislation can never be regarded as other than contrary to law, and indeed as abolishing the entire legal constitution.30 Like Hobbes, Kant holds that life outside a state’s authority (in a condition of statelessness) would subject us to serious perils. Since it is imperative to avoid these perils, people are obligated to found states and, once founded, to obey their commands—even if they undertake ‘unbearable abuse’ of the sovereign power.31 Anything less would amount to ‘abolishing the entire legal constitution’,32 effectively making subjects stateless again.33 Contemporary political theorists also invoke the perils of statelessness to justify state power and individuals’ acquiescence to it. In her early work, Stilz draws on Kant and Rousseau to argue that ‘justice is a necessarily institutional value, and the only institution in which it can be realized is the legitimate state.’34 According to Stilz, we can’t achieve justice (which she equates with equal freedom for all persons) without states because, whenever people live outside a state’s authority, they will ‘retain the power to interfere with [each other’s] choices unilaterally and at will.’35 She concludes, ‘one of our most fundamental duties of justice is the duty to belong to a legitimate state.’36 In turn, Stilz argues citizens are obligated to obey their states if 28 Ibid., 461–6. Ibid., 463. 30 Ibid., emphasis added. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Kant’s defense of state power does not entail that he would endorse the structure of today’s state system as it currently exists. Much interpretive work would be needed, for example, to fully draw out the implications of Kant’s prescriptions in Perpetual Peace and his notion of ‘cosmopolitan right’—which constrains how states ought to treat non-members—for his views on the ideal organization of the world order (see Kant 1996a [1797], 455, 489–92; 1996b [1795]). It would be reasonable to read Kant as a critic of state systems that give states the wide sovereign discretion our current system does. That said, Kant’s description of a dangerous state of nature from which we need states to protect us, and his invocation of this narrative to ground strong individual obligations to obey states is still rhetorically significant. It represents a rhetorical move that has become common in political theory: to invoke one image of the absence of state protection (the statelessness of the state of nature) and draw on it to justify the claim that people here and now have obligations to maintain and obey states. This is especially significant because Kant’s claim that individuals have strict obligations to obey their states (based on his state-of-nature narrative) is not obviously conditional on the establishment (or even attempted establishment) of his ideal world order. That is, it is not clear that Kant would see the existence of a flawed state system as undermining individuals’ obligations to obey their states. 34 Stilz 2009, 86, emphasis added. 35 Ibid., 56. 36 Ibid. 29 https://doi.org/10.1017/S175297192500003X Published online by Cambridge University Press