“In matters of boots, I defer to the bootmaker,”¹ is a quote that brings to mind the necessity of authority being temporary and task-bound. The bootmaker provides structure and expertise within a narrow scope, but Bakunin remains the final arbiter of the outcome. Authority exists only to enable the task, not to govern the person.

The bootmaker example is not a defense of expert rule, but an illustration of how authority can be bounded, voluntary, and self-terminating without becoming agency collapsing domination.

If the concept of agency preserving domination is taken seriously, then concerns about it must also be taken seriously. Critiques are not in competition with the concept; they are necessary extensions of it. History — and personal experience — offers ample evidence that “trusted authorities” can and do abuse power. (I include myself among those harmed by such abuse.)

For that reason, agency-preserving domination requires strict limiting conditions. It is justified only insofar as it is necessary to prevent greater domination, oriented toward restoring agency, and explicitly structured to render itself obsolete. Any intervention that entrenches dependency, resists contestation, or persists beyond the conditions that justified it ceases to be agency-preserving and loses legitimacy.


To be clear, constraint on human action is legitimate if and only if ALL of the following conditions hold:

Trigger Condition: Agentic Capacity Collapse
Agency is demonstrably impaired or the current exercise of agency produces ongoing net agency loss for others, such that reflective choice, communication, or nonviolent coordination is currently unavailable at the system level.
Disagreement alone does not qualify.

Necessity Condition: Least-Dominating Means
No non-coercive alternative exists that can restore safety or agency within the time horizon.
Constraint is used only to stop harm from escalating.

Scope Condition: Process, Not Outcome
The intervention may regulate process (separation, pause, mediation, containment).
It may not dictate beliefs, values, or final decisions.

Temporality Condition: Self-Liquidation
The constraint must be time-bound and designed to terminate automatically once capacity returns.
Persistent authority is unacceptable. Authority should never become an identity.

Expansion Condition: Net Agency Increase
The intervention must plausibly increase the future range of voluntary actions available to all parties.

Contestability Condition: Retrospective Accountability
The legitimacy of the intervention must remain open to challenge after the fact without penalty.

If ANY condition fails, the intervention is no longer agency-preserving and loses legitimacy.

In cases where a problem is ongoing, any authority to intervene must be continually reassessed. The persistence of conflict does not, by itself, justify persistent constraint. At each stage, the question must be whether agency remains sufficiently impaired to require intervention and whether the participants still desire collaboration over exit. As capacity returns, authority must contract, change form, or dissolve entirely.

✩‧₊˚─────⋆⋅☆⋅⋆─────˚₊‧✩‧₊˚─────⋆⋅☆⋅⋆─────˚₊‧✩‧₊˚─────⋆⋅☆⋅⋆─────˚₊‧✩

Notes:
♥︎ If you read through the conditions above with the American carceral system in mind, you’ll see that it fails all of these checks.

♥︎ It’s also worth noting that in times of mass crisis, domination becomes easier. Therefore, justification must become harder. More frequent intervention may be necessary, but broader authority is not. Scope discipline becomes more important during crises, not less. There must be no slide from “emergency powers” into a “new normal.”

♥︎ In cases where it is possible, reasonable, and consented to by all parties, transparent witnessing may help prevent abuse.

To avoid situations where harm happens out of sight, a neutral “unfiltered observer” may be present (either a silent peer or a decentralized record) whose sole role is to confirm that the six conditions above were met.

The observer does not direct the process or influence outcomes. Their presence protects the mediator from false accusations and protects participants from misuse of power.

♥︎ This framework overlaps with therapeutic containment in its use of temporary boundaries to restore capacity, but it is not therapy. It does not rely on professional authority, does not aim at personal healing, and dissolves once cooperation is possible.

♡

1. Bakunin, Mikhail. “What Is Authority?” (1870), in Bakunin on Anarchy, ed. Sam Dolgoff. approx pg 229. ↩︎