Introduction

In Chapter 1, I explored the particularity principle of political obligation. This principle ties political obligation to the particular state that one is a member of, and according to John Horton, without it there can be no theory of political obligation. Political membership, insofar as political obligation is concerned, thus functions only to the extent that political identity is defined by one's membership of a specific state and presumably to the state where one lives. There are some significant empirical problems with this framing that can lay doubt on the extent to which obligations to obey the law transgress state borders and the limits of citizenship, as well as the uniformity that this principle assumes with regard to the relationship each citizen has to their state– what about permanent residents, what is meant/understood by citizenship, what about tourists and their obligation to obey the law, what about the international law of extra-territoriality or extradition treaties, what about crimes against humanity, what about citizens’ different experiences of the law and of institutional discrimination?– and so the particularity principle is best understood as an ideal type.

Consequently, what the particularity principle also does is enable theories of political obligation to sidestep some important considerations. One of these has to do with how the state is defined and how this definition in turn shapes what is understood by politics. In a sense, all theories of political obligation could be read as theories of state because without political obligation there would be no state, and so to explain political obligation is also to explain and justify the state. What is meant by politics then follows from this centrality of the state. However, if we look more closely at how the state is understood in some of the political obligation literature, it is not only security and other normative goods that the state provides which are used to define the state. The traditional definition of the modern state as provided by Max Weber is also used, which links the state to violence and power.