An important trend in philosophy over the last decade has been an increased focus on group agents. Corporations and states, for example, are not like a bag of mice moving about aimlessly: such groups have coordination and structure, which allows us to say that the group itself possesses agency: it intends, plans, and acts. We can speak of its freedom and autonomy, hold it morally responsible, and ascribe duties and rights to it. Arthur Isak Applbaum’s book harnesses this trend in an attempt to solve the problem of political legitimacy. We are legitimately governed, Applbaum argues, only when we are governed by a group agent of which we are a member, and only if each of us individually and the group agent are free.

Applbaum rejects many of the common approaches to the justification of government, such as consent or the social contract. The only successful answer to “why can government rule over me?” on Applbaum’s account, then, is something like “we are ruling over you, but you are part of this we.” This is an ambitious and novel way to approach the issue and one that has intuitive appeal.

Applbaum’s book has three parts. The first part, formed of two chapters, modestly aims to make logical space for the group agency account. Applbaum rejects purely proceduralist views on which legitimacy is exhausted by following some process, like majority rule. In the second chapter, Applbaum argues that legitimacy, conceptually, is “a kind of moral power, the power to create and enforce nonmoral …prescriptions and social facts” (p. 47). One upshot of this conceptualization is that legitimacy does not entail duties to obey.

We come to the core of Applbaum’s view in chapter 3. He starts from the liberal demand that the coercion of political institutions must be shown to be compatible with individual freedom. This is only possible, he argues, if you are governed by a free group agent of which you are a free member. The task, then, is to describe how group agents come about and how they retain the freedom of their members. Applbaum describes three ways in which group agents can be “constituted” and three ways in which individuals can be “conscripted into” groups. Government is primarily constituted by the existence of “procedures,” Applbaum suggests, and individuals are conscripted into it by “practical necessity”: they must will to be governed because it is a necessary means to realize their freedom.

Applbaum’s discussion is immensely rich in ideas, but key notions and arguments remain underdeveloped. For example, he relies on a neo-Republican notion of (external) freedom, on which freedom is the absence of the “wrongful subjection to the will of another” (p. 81). But Applbaum does not explain why this notion of freedom is chosen and whether the argument would still succeed with a different account of freedom. Furthermore, if freedom is the absence of wrongful domination by others, then we must rely on some background normative judgments about when some exercise of power is wrongful. But it is hard to know where these judgments come from.

Similarly, the notion that political institutions are practically necessary plays a major role in Applbaum’s argument. For example, he relies on Kantian ideas about the wrongfulness of remaining in a state of nature (p. 251). Wanting to live under political institutions, we are told, is not merely “a demand of instrumental rationality, or even of prudence, but a requirement of agency itself” (p. 104). These are big pronouncements to make that come with heavy philosophical baggage. The book sketches some ways to motivate these ideas but does not do enough to fully defend them. These background commitments also raise the worry that group agency is a red herring and that Applbaum’s view is carried by some background of neo-Republican and Kantian ideas about freedom. If you do not share these beliefs, however, it is not immediately clear how much appeal the group agency account still holds.

Chapter 4 is grouped together with chapter 3 and applies these ideas to a narrower question of whether a people can be forced to be free—Applbaum’s illuminating case study is “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” He constructs a compelling framework for how we can approach the paradoxical-sounding notion of “forcing to be free.” But with respect to the central group agency account, the chapter does not shed enough additional light. For example, Applbaum, in the space of three pages (pp. 124–26), mentions no less than 12 possible ways how we might defend the importance of group agency, but he does not explicitly endorse any one: it is left to the reader to sketch all of the possibilities and how they could be philosophically supported.

The highlight of the book is its final part, in which Applbaum discusses three conditions of legitimacy—the “liberty,” “equality,” and “agency” conditions—which correspond to three ways in which government can fail to make us free on his view. First, because political institutions must realize and protect our freedom, they become illegitimate if they violate core individual freedoms, even if they act with flawless democratic pedigree (chap. 5). This leads Applbaum to endorse countermajoritarian institutions, such as constitutional constraints on what democratic majorities can decide. Second, Applbaum argues, the group agency account also imposes procedural conditions on legitimacy (chap. 6). Even the most benign despot is illegitimate because he or she fails to provide us with freedom as a form of coauthorship of the laws. Political institutions must ensure political equality, which Applbaum understands to mean equality of “normative power,” as opposed to equal causal power over results. A third way in which political institutions can lack legitimacy, and which gives the book its title, is by being “wanton,” which is the lack of a “capacity to form second-order volitions” (p. 222). Even if our political institutions give us liberty and political equality, their decision making might be incontinent, inconstant, or incoherent. If our political institutions fail as an agent in these ways, they fail to realize our freedom, Applbaum suggests.

The combination of these three principles amounts to a plausible middle path between various extreme positions. The diagnosis of wantonism provides a novel and fruitful way to think about the failures of our governments. Applbaum also offers excellent, in-depth discussions of many applied issues, such as the role of money in politics (pp. 201–9) and government secrecy (pp. 232–41).

Overall, the book is rewarding for its original approach to legitimacy and its many and vivid case studies. It also provides convincing criticism of dead ends to the topic of legitimacy. The group agency account, as it is developed in the book, raises as many questions as it answers. The book is best read, I think, as a powerful framework for how we might approach the issue of legitimacy anew, through the lens of group agency. Applbaum’s analysis of wanton government shows some of the fruits this way of thinking can yield. Legitimacy: The Right to Rule in a Wanton World should provide fertile grounds for scholarly debate for years to come.