The authority of the state

[...] modern men go on exhibiting a superstitious belief in the authority of the state.

The myth of legitimate authority is the secular reincarnation of that religious superstition which has finally ceased to play a significant role in the affairs of men. Like Christianity, the worship of the state has its fundamentalists, its revisionists, its ecumenicists, and its theological rationale. The philosophical anarchist is the atheist of politics. [...] the belief of legitimacy, like the penchant for transcendent metaphysics, is an ineradicable irrationality of the human experience. However, the slow extinction of religious faith over the past two centuries may encourage us to hope that in time anarchism, like atheism, will become the accepted conviction of enlightened and rational men. Robert Paul Wolff in On Violence

Robert Paul Wolff on wikipedia