¹ For an analysis that makes being located in something like a “global body politic” a sufficient condition for a crisis to qualify as a global crisis, see Stephen Davies, “From Regions to the World: Global Crises from the Third Century to Today,” elsewhere in this volume.

² In this essay, I am only interested in the moral dimensions of political legitimacy. A complete account of legitimacy has to make room for both its moral dimensions and its descriptive dimensions, as well as to explain the relations between them. For an account on which the descriptive dimensions of legitimacy are paramount, though still tempered by a moral lining, see Tucker, Paul, Global Discord (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022), chaps. 12–13 Google Scholar.

³ Strictly speaking, one might hold that citizens always “have” a duty not to overthrow a legitimate government, but that this duty only applies to them—or only takes effect—when the government to which they are subject is legitimate. However, this way of speaking strikes me as confusing. If a duty does not apply to the citizens, I shall simply say that they do not have it.

⁴ In some cases, a revolution may be morally required, all things considered; and one might regard this as an even stronger form of justification than all things considered permissibility. It is, but I make no claim that the two senses of justification I am distinguishing are the only senses there are. For our purposes, all things considered permission is a more useful notion than all things considered requirement precisely because it is less demanding. What matters is that it is much more demanding than a mere liberty and, therefore, quite different from one.

⁵ Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, rev. ed., ed. Laslett, Peter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Renzo, Massimo, “Revolution and Intervention,” Noûs 54, no. 1 (2020): 233–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Section citations for Locke (e.g., sec. 168) refer to his Second Treatise.

⁶ On the first necessary condition, see Locke, secs. 168, 207. On the second, see the end of sec. 168: “Nor let any one think, this lays a perpetual foundation for Disorder: for this operates not, till the Inconvenience is so great, that the Majority feel it, and are weary of it, and find a necessity to have it amended.” As the preceding text makes clear, “this” refers both times to the right of revolution. See also secs. 240, 242, and esp. 243, all to be read in the context of secs. 95–99. There is a famous slip at lines 16–19 of sec. 168, where Locke appears to suggest that a single individual can decide for himself whether the conditions of tyranny are satisfied and thereby acquire a liberty to revolt. However, the weight of the text and the logic of his own argument plainly undermine taking this seriously as interpretation. Finally, there is an exception to the theory I attribute to Locke in the main text; it concerns when the political society itself has been dissolved (principally, as a result of a foreign invasion) (sec. 211). Outside the state of nature, though, all judgment rests with the majority.

⁷ For present purposes, I set aside questions about Locke’s first additional necessary condition. Some kind of last resort condition is, in any case, plainly required for all things considered permission to revolt. The issue, then, is only whether it (also) attaches, more specifically, to a liberty to revolt. A case can be made on both sides. Readers should feel free to qualify what follows, if need be, with their preferred resolution.

⁸ Some philosophers deny this. Notoriously, Immanuel Kant is a prominent example. For some discussion of Kant’s position, including attention to the stark contrast between him and Locke on this point, see Flikschuh, Katrin “Reason, Right, and Revolution: Kant and Locke,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 36, no. 4 (2008): 375–404 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ There is, of course, substantial controversy about what the conditions of illegitimate government really are. It might well belong to a disagreement between a minority and the majority about the legitimacy of their common government. But it need not belong to their disagreement for our dispute with Locke to arise and our discussion will be cleaner if we suppose that there is no disagreement on this score. For good measure, we can also suppose that the conditions of illegitimacy on which citizens in this society agree are the correct ones. Unlike Locke, contemporary writers often omit to specify any account of the substance of these conditions. For example, Renzo simply refers to cases of “ordinary oppression.” Renzo, “Revolution and Intervention,” 233. Cf. Allen Buchanan’s similar use of “resolute severe tyranny.” Buchanan, Allen, “The Ethics of Revolution and Its Implications for the Ethics of Intervention,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 41, no. 4 (2013): 291–323 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ In the real world, there is no room for stipulations about which party to a disagreement is correct. That can serve to motivate additional procedural conditions on a liberty to revolt (e.g., it is one reason to favor a last-resort proviso; cf. n. 7). While I have not specified anything other than sincere belief, I am happy to leave this issue open.

¹¹ Buchanan advocates this treatment explicitly and also provides a helpful exposition. See his “Ethics of Revolution,” 292–93, 295–96.

¹² Strictly speaking, only express consent is irrevocable (Locke, sec. 121). However, tacit consent does not even result in membership of the relevant political society (sec. 122), but only in submission to its laws. Hence, those who tacitly consent have no authority to judge whether the conditions of justified revolution are satisfied in any case and remain duty-bound not to revolt throughout. For Locke’s third proposition, see secs. 95–99.

¹³ An intermediate route involves spelling out that, on Locke’s analysis, the conditions for tyranny are largely equivalent to the conditions under which the government violates a term of its trust. According to Locke, the government’s authority to exercise political power in the first place is delegated to it in trust by the members of political society. Since these members are the trustees on whose behalf political power is exercised, they retain the authority to judge whether any term of the trust has been violated, that is, a majority of them retains it. All of this falls within the scope of an individual’s original power to execute the law of nature just because “political power” is itself a constituent element of that executive power.

¹⁴ While the name is Renzo’s, the asymmetry view is most famously defended by Michael Walzer in his Just and Unjust Wars, 4th ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2006). Part of Renzo’s ambition is “precisely to take the central insight of Walzer’s view and provide an alternative, more plausible articulation of it.” Renzo, “Revolution and Intervention,” 235. Like Walzer, Renzo aims to defend the asymmetry view by reference to the value of political self-determination. However, he defends it in a much narrower range of cases than Walzer does.

¹⁵ Renzo, “Revolution and Intervention,” 233. In cases of supreme humanitarian emergency, Renzo accepts that “the conditions for the permissibility of armed humanitarian intervention … coincide with the conditions for the permissibility of revolution” (234). Thus, symmetry reigns there.

¹⁶ Renzo, “Revolution and Intervention,” 248.

¹⁷ Renzo, “Revolution and Intervention,” 249. Since a requirement of domestic consent is precisely the same obstacle that obstructs “a third party intervening from abroad,” Renzo concludes that, in vanguard cases, symmetry actually reigns again between the conditions for the permissibility of revolution and the conditions for the permissibility of intervention.

¹⁸ As we have seen, Locke also incorporates a last resort principle. See n. 7 above and text there.

¹⁹ To be clear, “success” here refers to military success in overthrowing the existing regime. It says nothing about the political situation in the days to follow. Of course, differences in equipment or training may erase any advantage due to sheer numbers. This point cuts both ways. In other cases, a smaller vanguard may plausibly have a reasonable prospect of success all by itself. More commonly, however, revolutionary vanguards need help to succeed. In “Ethics of Revolution,” Buchanan has an instructive discussion of the acute moral problems that attend many of the methods typically employed in recruiting support from the general population.

²⁰ I take it that this is something like Kant’s position. For discussion, see Ripstein, Arthur, Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Applbaum, Arthur, Legitimacy: The Right to Rule in a Wanton World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²¹ That membership in political society is compulsory does not entail that continued membership in a given political society is compulsory. Whether and why that further claim might be true is the equivalent, within a nonvoluntarist framework, of the question facing Locke about why consent to join political society is irrevocable. Nonvoluntarists who deny that minorities can have a liberty to go it alone will, of course, need to defend their own affirmative answer.

²² Alternatively, a justification for majority rule can only succeed in providing every member of political society with a good reason to abide by what the majority decides insofar as it provides for the satisfaction of certain conditions.

²³ The best-known exponent of this kind of strategy is John Hart Ely, Democracy and Distrust: A Theory of Judicial Review (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). However, the version I shall begin with is stricter or even more minimal than Ely’s. For example, not only does Ely himself affirm the three additions on which I shall presently insist, but he takes them to be part and parcel of his strategy rather than representing additions to it.

²⁴ To license this conclusion, we have only to affirm in clear conscience—following the pattern of the argument for universal suffrage—that no decisions made by any majority of free members in some political society give its enslaved members (if there are any) a good reason to abide by the result.

²⁵ For simplicity, I shall discuss these three freedoms together, even though they are clearly separable, at least by and large, and nothing turns on treating them as a compound condition.

²⁶ Dworkin, Ronald, Freedom’s Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 23 Google Scholar.

²⁷ In addition to all of this, Dworkin also requires that the collective decision-making process express a “bona fide conception of equal concern for the interests” of all members of the political society. Dworkin, Freedom’s Law, 25. As Dworkin understands them, both this condition and the right to privacy are potentially very substantial conditions, encompassing a fair bit of liberal morality.

²⁸ It is not entirely clear where exactly Ely would part company with Dworkin, as his list of presupposed conditions continues to expand. However, Ely clearly would not accept the condition of equal concern, which is not remotely procedural, so they part company eventually.

²⁹ If the preferred analysis of tyranny as the occasion for justified revolution includes a requirement that the tyranny has been endured for an extended period—either directly or, as on Locke’s analysis, as a side-effect of requiring that all lesser remedies have been exhausted first—then this condition will also belong to what has been fixed by our stipulations.

³⁰ On the epistemic case for majority rule, see, e.g., Estlund, David, Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. I do not insist that the case for majority rule has to have an epistemic basis. For those who think that the epistemic case contributes nothing to the justification of majority rule, this second consideration is irrelevant.

³¹ The caveat I have inserted spells something out that is clearly implicit (but not, I think, explicit) in Renzo’s analysis. It raises a number of important issues that would call for some clarification in a fuller treatment, such as what number or proportion of citizens is required to make such an invitation effective and what individual citizens have to do in order to be counted among that number.

³² For elaboration on this point, in the context of a wider-ranging analysis of political legitimacy, see Sreenivasan, Gopal, “Three Concepts of Legitimacy,” in Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, vol. 10 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), 1–27 Google Scholar.