The paper offers a realist account of political obligation. More precisely, it offers
an account that belongs to the Williamsian liberal strain of contemporary realist
theory (as opposed to a Geussian radical realist strain) and draws on and expands
some ideas familiar from Bernard Williams’s oeuvre (thick/thin ethical concepts, political
realism/moralism, a minimal normative threshold for distinctively political rule).
Accordingly, the paper will claim that the fact of membership in a polity provides
people with sufficient reason for complying with those political authority claims
whose source is that particular polity. The paper will explain that membership in
a polity is constituted not by communitarian identification (Horton), nationhood (Tamir),
joined commitment/plural subjectivity (Gilbert), but by the fact that people are stably
exposed to political authority claims associated with a particular polity which they
find making sense as passing the minimal normative threshold for a distinctively political
form of rule (as opposed to the rule of terror or sheer coercion). This political-ethical
phenomenon is widely known as political obligation but the paper will argue that the
label is in fact a misnomer because it does not refer to a generic obligation. The
implications of this account are manifold but two seem especially important: first,
the notion of political obligation makes sense even beyond the realm of moralist political
theory and, second, realist political theory should pay more attention to the problem
of compliance than it used to do.
