โ Scribed by Kai Nielsen
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
It is difficult to know where to start in examining political obligation and perhaps, within certain bounds, any starting place is somewhat arbitrary. Be that as it may, I want to start with the seminal topics of power and authority. Politics is certainly about power and authority. And, particularly in troubled times, when the State, rightly or wrongly, is perceived to be "sick" we find ourselves asking: When (under what conditions, if indeed ever) must we obey the State and accept as legitimate the sovereignty of the State? Do we generally have a duty to obey the dictates of the State? When, if ever, morally speaking, are we justified in disobeying? When, if ever, is State power legitimate authority?
So we need to think about power, force, authority, legitimacy and the State. Some political scientists of a rather empirical bent have thought that all this reduces to the question of power. That, they believe, is the basic fact, the ultimate datum of politics. The only really crucial thing for political theory to do is to make an inquiry into the actual allocation of power. We need to determine, if we can, "who gets what, where, how". Two nearly contemporary Italian social theorists, Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, powerfully and systematically articulated this view of things. (Steven Lukes refers to them, along with Mitchels, as neo-Machiavellian elite theorists.) They claim, Mosca and Pareto more uncompromisingly than Michels, that the study of politics, from the earliest times to the present, reveals that power in any given territory has always been exercised by a small political elite (more neutrally a small group of people) over the rest of the people in that territory. The situation, they claim, has per~,asively been that of a small elite wielding power and
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