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Does membership in a political society obligate one to support the political institutions of that society? Dubbed the membership problem, its terms are given some initial clarification. Among other things, a society is construed as a social group in a relatively narrow sense illustrated with examples. The membership problem is carefully distinguished from several distinct but closely resembling problems familiar from the literature of political philosophy. Importantly, it concerns obligations that are genuine but not necessarily best referred to as moral obligations.

This chapter argues that a fully satisfactory theory of political obligation will pass certain tests. It will offer an affirmative answer to the membership problem and, among other things, it will show how membership in a political society gives one obligations to uphold that society’s political institutions. There are discussions of A. John Simmons’s ‘generality test’ and of some broad notions of membership: membership through residence and imputed membership.

The best-known theory of political obligation is actual contract theory: a political society is founded on an agreement, and the parties to the agreement — now the members of the society — are obligated accordingly. As is generally admitted, actual contract theory has significant attractions as a solution to the membership problem. For one, agreements are a canonical source of obligations. For another, an agreement may indeed suffice to found a social group in general. This chapter details eight analytic points that have been or might be judged to favour of the theory, and five ways in which it might appear to be morally attractive.

A political society was defined in Chapter 1 as a society with institutions of governance. These institutions are its institutions. Three kinds of institution of governance are discussed, all involving social rules of one kind or another: governing rules, personal rule, and rules of governance or constitutional rules. The nature of social rules is explored in counterpoint to the classical account of H.L.A. Hart, and an alternative joint commitment account is offered. Given this account, the members of a political society are jointly committed to uphold its institutions of governance. By the argument of the previous chapters, they will then be obligated to uphold the institutions in question. This is the gist of the plural subject theory of political obligation.

The book’s argument is summarized and its conclusions are brought to hear on two classic situations of crisis: Socrates awaiting the death penalty in prison, and Antigone in her conflict with the ruler of her political society, Creon. Emphasis is given to the point that though obligations of joint commitment are absolute in the sense discussed, and supersede one’s personal inclinations and self-interest as such, it is possible for other considerations to ‘trump’ them. Antigone believed there were such considerations in her case; Socrates seems not to have thought so. A number of avenues for further empirical investigation and moral inquiry are noted.

In pursuit of a satisfactory theory of political obligation, a start is made towards the articulation of a particular conception of a political society, with a focus on social groups. These range from the enduring and relatively permanent to the small and transient: even two people out on a walk together constitute such a group by virtue of their joint activity. This chapter makes a number of observations on that case that may serve as tests of an account of joint activity generally. For instance, the parties are understood to have a special standing to rebuke each other for action that undermines the joint activity and upon which there has been no explicit or implicit concurrence between the parties. Various ways in which joint activity may come about, including initial agreements, are explored and an account of joint activity in terms of the parties’ joint commitment is sketched.

The question of party political decline is approached by examining four aspects that have featured prominently in debate: parties as representative agencies; party organization; parties in relation to the state and society; and parties in their ‘external’ environment. The last aspect includes discussion of the alternatives to party democracy and ‘party deficit’ in the European Union. Since this account is concerned with European developments, the effects of European integration on the role of political parties are particularly relevant. Before the main analysis is undertaken, the chapter takes a brief look at the whole question of party decline in its historical context.

Offers a reconstruction of John Locke's voluntaristic theory of legitimate political authority with the aim of overcoming the following two problems with tacit consent via residence: that it fails to bind either because it is unfreely given or because it is offered in circumstances of inequality. Builds on the author's defence in Ch. 1 of an egalitarian version of the Lockean proviso to remedy these problems and endorses a highly voluntaristic, pluralistic, and decentralized account of legitimate political authority.

During the 1950s, India’s agrarian economy was marked by class divisions that were comparable to those of feudal societies. The new Indian republic had two democratic aspirations: to abolish, or at least set limits on, feudal claims on the land and its peasants and create a class of cultivators with full ownership rights; and to mitigate the practices of caste discrimination that were significantly associated with claims by landowning upper castes on the labour and services of lower castes. However, the only option to extend cultivation into virgin lands in India was to increase productivity in agriculture. This chapter focuses on democracy and capitalism in India. It first discusses class power and Indian democracy during the 1950s–1980s and then examines transformed structures of political power. It also considers political society and the management of non-corporate capital, peasant culture and politics, and political society and the law of small numbers.

This chapter considers the extent to which the English parliament both resembled and, more particularly, differed from the assemblies of continental Europe, notably those of France. It uses continental comparisons to draw out and enlarge on some of the main themes treated in the preceding chapters. It shows that much of parliament's peculiar evolution can be traced back to its Anglo‐Saxon origins and to the peculiarities of English political society, where the nobility's lack of privilege, notably their inability to escape taxation, provided a common platform for their association with other political groups. A second theme of this chapter lies in the extent to which parliament developed as a popular assembly, where policies could be publicly announced and transmitted to the localities and where redress of popular grievances could be sought. In both these respects parliament differed from its continental counterparts, giving some considerable substance to the ancient notion of ‘English exceptionalism’.

In terms of cleavage formation, policy influence, public opinion changeling, interest representation, and control and oversight, the functions of Hong Kong's legislature underwent significant evolution after the early colonial era. Before the elections, the Legislative Council served as the venue for selective co-option. Institutional changes were seen after popularly elected members were included, and Legco's policy influence and interest representation were improved. Legco contributed through an interest aggregation role during the period between 1995 and 1997, when Legco's influence was at its peak. Its influence was however weakened after 1997. Although there had been hopes that it may be able to bridge the gap between the society and the state, Hong Kong's maturity into a political society was hindered by its weakened role.

This chapter questions John Finnis's interpretation of Thomas Aquinas, concerning the specifically political common good. It is evident that Thomas limits the zone of human life subject to direction by the human legislator. Not only is God to be obeyed rather than man, but man's jurisdiction over man is not all embracing and leaves room for personal responsibility in such key areas as marriage. Finnis finds Thomas's justification of the limits not altogether clear, and proposes a conception of specifically political society as that of Thomas—a conception that is held to help clarify the situation. The said conception seeks to present political society as something less that a “basic human good.” It is argued that the “society” mentioned in Summa theologiae (ST) 1-2.94.2 is primarily political society; that we have a natural inclination to life in political society; and that the goal of the legislator is the development of virtue in the citizen. Thomas gives good reasons for limiting the role of the legislator, and indeed limits the common good of political society (to merely human virtue). Those limits imply the wider common good of the whole of reality. Thus, the Finnis appeal to private or personal zones is inadequate if the goal is to interpret Thomas.

The French Revolution polarised popular politics in England. This chapter examines the rise of working-class radical societies and the response by loyalist elites in the 1790s. It argues that loyalism involved enforcing processes of exclusion and intrusion. Radicals were excluded from meeting in civic buildings and pubs, and from taking part in local government. Magistrates intruded into private meetings through spies and arrests. This chapter focuses on the cases of Thomas Walker of Manchester and Joseph Gales of Sheffield, forced out of their business and civic lives by the threat of loyalist suppression. It also examines popular loyalism in the form of burnings of effigies of Thomas Paine and ‘Church and King’ riots.

From 1795 radicals and trades unions held mass meetings in politically resonant sites. This chapter examines their defence of the liberty to meet during and after the French and Napoleonic wars. It surveys the response in northern England to government legislation against ‘seditious’ writings and meetings. It underlines the significance of the ‘mass platform’ and its meeting sites, and how working-class groups hired their own meeting rooms and developed networks of delegates and unions across the North. These were sites of contestation over legality and public space. The March of the Blanketeers in 1817 marked a turning point in government fears of revolution and in radicals’ strategies. The chapter concludes with the revival of reform societies in 1818-19, providing the context for the Peterloo Massacre of 1819.

This chapter looks at the author's personal reflections on Wittgenstein's work. In Wittgenstein, he finds a de-divinized description of theorizing that befits the challenges of living and seeing in political society today. These challenges begin with the question of where to look when seeking or seeing politics or political phenomena. In the epic tradition, politics was conceived spatially as a place — the city, the polis, and the government — that locale where the theorist cannot go without being subjected to punishment by those in power. The politics of today is a politics of resistance and dissent. The drama arises sporadically in the form of protest and imaginatively in the playfulness of street theatre. Perceiving these acts requires the intimacy that the epic tradition eschewed. To theorize today is to pursue what this book has offered as Wittgenstein's path to politics.

This chapter explores the phenomenon of reasonable disagreement, which is an idea that can seem paradoxical because of the philosophical tradition that leads inevitably to the convergence of opinion. It analyzes the conception of political legitimacy that follows the fundamental principles of political society as they are coercive in nature. It discusses liberalism that is seen more clearly than past conceptions about the true task of political philosophy due to the reflective culture imbued with historical self-awareness. The chapter also provides a clear view of the fundamental problems confronting political society. It reviews political liberalism, which is understood as a form of liberal theory that is different from classical liberalism and becomes a vigorous area of philosophical reflection.

This chapter delves deeper into the history of the phrase, sans culottes. It shows that the point of the joke about breeches was that someone without culottes had the wrong kind of status, emotion, and decorum on which salon society was based. One further reason for the joke's late eighteenth-century resonance was that it fitted a real writer remarkably well. The chapter reveals that the writer in question was the satirical poet Nicolas-Joseph-Laurent Gilbert. Gilbert seems to have led a life that was something like a literal version of the tale of literary ambition, abject poverty, and unscrupulous exploitation told by Voltaire in his satirical poem Le pauvre diable (The Poor Devil, 1760). Finally, the chapter discusses some debates between Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on vitalist and contractual conceptions of political society.