Essay on the idea of political obligation to the state

Introduction

This essay examines why anyone should obey the state, which is the question of political obligation. It sets out the meaning of the idea, the main grounds offered, the limits within which the duty holds, and an assessment.

Meaning of political obligation

Political obligation is the duty of a person to accept and obey the commands of the authority under which they live, and it is the subject of Unit V alongside the idea of political community. The word goes back to a Latin root for what binds a person to perform what is required. IGNOU separates three senses of it: in ethics, a duty a person accepts through rational understanding; in jurisprudence, the regulation of social life by law; and in politics, the bond to live under some authority and obey it. The theory of political obligation asks why people obey the state as an authority and in what circumstances they should disobey it.

It is tied to legitimacy. Holders of power want their subjects to believe in the rightness of their rule; once power is accepted as legitimate, people obey freely and force need not be constantly on display. Some people comply only because breaking the rules would be punished, but a system is more stable to the degree that people obey because they accept the established order as legitimate, and in practice every system rests on a mix of consent and coercion.

IGNOU gives political obligation three features. It includes resistance: people are to be critical of the way authority is used and to resist invasions of their liberties, though protest must be related to social well-being and should not cause the total breakdown of the state. It is bound up with legitimacy and effectiveness, the belief that existing institutions are the most appropriate ones and the measure of how well the system performs. And it asks every conscientious person to take an interest in public affairs and policy, with honesty and public spirit on both sides.

Citizenship adds that obligations run among citizens and not only to the state: besides the legal obligations states impose, there is a moral obligation to take part in and contribute to the shared life of the community, and in a democracy disputes are to be settled by negotiation and discussion and not by force.

Grounds of political obligation

Each theory of political obligation names a different sanction behind the duty to obey. The main answers to "why obey the state?" are these.

1. Consent and social contract. Obligation rests on the will of the people. Hobbes and Locke argued that people in a state of nature made a contract by which political authority came into being on their consent, and Rousseau gave the idea a philosophical form by placing obligation in the general will, the law of the general good that a member of civil society is bound to obey. For Locke the aim and justification of government is to protect life, liberty and property, and people can form governments and also dissolve them. The theory makes legitimate authority rest on the consent of the governed and gives a right to resist a government that breaks the contract, which has helped to protect liberties and check arbitrary rulers. Its weakness is that a contract made in an imagined state of nature is a fiction that does not bind the present generation in law, and people can claim to withdraw consent whenever they object, so a theory of obligation turns into a theory of rebellion.
2. Divine right. One of the oldest answers: the ruler's authority comes directly from God, so subjects are bound by religion to obey and may not rebel even against a wicked king. It was widely held in the Middle Ages; Grotius, Hobbes and Locke rejected its metaphysical basis for consent, and secularism and then democracy took away its appeal.
3. Idealist theory. The source of obligation is human rationality: the state is a self-sufficing community, identical with society, so there is no opposition between individual and state, and a person develops best by obeying it. Plato and Aristotle treated the state and its members as an organic whole, Hegel identified the individual's liberty with complete obedience to the state, and Green linked political obligation with moral obligation, so that only actions serving a moral end should be made obligatory. Critics call it too abstract and note its reluctance to admit a right of resistance: Green and Bosanquet allowed it only in exceptional cases and vaguely, and Treitschke went as far as asking people to worship the state.
4. Prescriptive or traditional theory. Authority is legitimate when long custom sanctions it, and people obey because obedience has become a settled convention; the state is a delicate structure built over time that balances conflicting interests, so the duty is to obey while working only for gradual, peaceful change. Hegel held that morality takes concrete form in the customs and institutions of the state, so the present order is owed obedience; Burke placed obligation in respect for tradition, supporting the American colonists who claimed the traditional rights of Englishmen but opposing the French Revolution for its abstract rights of man; Oakeshott treats politics as a skill learnt by practice. Conservatives likewise read liberty as doing one's duty within an organic society and see authority as arising naturally within it. The objection is that people also do away with traditions that have lost their use, and that the theory would oblige people to accept long-established unjust laws such as racial discrimination.
5. Marxian theory. There is no obligation to the bourgeois state before the revolution, total obligation to the new state of the proletariat after it, and finally, as the state withers away in a classless and stateless society, political obligation is converted into social obligation. Critics say it rests on expediency, since what is urged against the bourgeois state is forbidden against the new one, and that it ignores the individual's own judgement in deciding whether to obey.
6. Legitimacy and democracy. In a democracy, participation by citizens adds legitimacy to government policies and allows accountability; voting once in five years is not enough, and a government without participation loses legitimacy and has to rely on force. Rousseau argued that people more readily accept a law they helped to make.

Limits of obligation: resistance, disobedience and revolution

Obligation is not unconditional. IGNOU treats resistance as part of the idea itself: citizens are to judge how authority is used and to resist invasions of their liberties, provided the protest is tied to social well-being and does not bring about the total breakdown of the state. The contract theory gives a right to resist a government that breaks its terms, and Locke held that people who form governments may also dissolve them. When a regime loses legitimacy it must rely mainly on force; it may last for some time, but its position becomes precarious, and once it rests far more on force than on consent one condition for revolution is present. Revolutions are often prepared by a period in which the ideas that justify the old order are attacked, as Divine Right and autocracy were before the fall of the old regime in France.

Civil disobedience is one principled form of refusal. Gandhi found in Thoreau's essay on the duty of civil disobedience support for his views on the coercive side of the state and on a person's obligation to their own conscience. In satyagraha a person who finds a law repugnant to conscience does not obey it and accepts the penalty for the breach, using soul-force instead of the force of arms; picketing, non-payment of taxes and the defiance of particular laws are among its methods of civil disobedience. Martin Luther King Jr. led the movement against the segregation laws in the southern United States and called for peaceful, non-violent resistance to them. NCERT adds that in a democracy disputes should be settled by negotiation and discussion instead of force, which is itself an obligation of citizenship.

The Marxian challenge. Marxism denies any obligation to the bourgeois state before the revolution and expects political obligation to give way to social obligation once the state withers away. Its critics reply that it is a theory of expediency, since it forbids against the new state the very disobedience it urged against the old one.

Assessment. Neither blind obedience nor general disobedience is defensible. Obligation is strongest where power is accepted as legitimate and citizens take part in decisions, weaker where a regime rests on force, and always open to conscientious, non-violent refusal.

Conclusion

Political obligation to the state is neither absolute nor non-existent. Its grounds range from consent and tradition to reason and democratic participation, and it weakens when power ceases to be accepted as legitimate and has to rest on force.