  For most contemporary theorists to say that the state has authority in the descriptive sense is to say that the state maintains public order and that it issues commands and makes rules that are generally obeyed by subjects because many of them (or some important subset of them such as the officials of the state) think of it as having authority in the normative sense (Hart 1961) (Some thinkers have understood the idea of legitimate authority in this descriptive sense as well (Weber 1970); in what follows, we will use the term “legitimate authority” in a normative sense only.) We should note here that the attitudinal component of de facto authority is not accepted by everyone. For both Thomas Hobbes and John Austin, political authority in the de facto sense simply amounts to the capacity of a person or group of persons to maintain public order and secure the obedience of most people by issuing commands backed by sanctions.  Subjects need not think of the authority as a legitimate authority, on this account.