  One can see different accounts of the legitimacy of political authority as responses to the anarchist challenge. Let us start with the instrumentalist account of legitimacy. The canonical statement of this notion of legitimate authority is provided by Joseph Raz. He calls it the Normal Justification Thesis. It asserts that “the normal way to establish that a person has authority over another person involves showing that the alleged subject is likely better to comply with reasons which apply to him (other than the alleged authoritative directives) if he accepts the directives of the alleged authority as authoritatively binding and tries to follow them, rather than by trying to follow the reasons which apply to him directly.” (Raz 1986)