Consent

References and further reading

All of the following involve detailed and sometimes subtle argument, but all are also accessible to readers without formal training in philosophy.

	Beran, H. (1987) The Consent Theory of Political Obligation, London: Croom Helm. (The most complete presentation of consent theory in political philosophy.)
	Feinberg, J. (1986) Harm to Self, New York: Oxford University Press. (The best discussion of the conditions on consent is given in chapters 22–6.)
	Green, L. (1988) The Authority of the State, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Careful discussion in chapter 6 of the relation between consent and political authority.)
	Kleinig, J. (1982) ‘The Ethics of Consent’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy supplementary vol. 8: 91–118. (Thorough treatment of the nature of and conditions on consent.)
	Locke, J. (1690) The Second Treatise of Government, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960. (The classic statement of the consent theory of political obligation and authority, centred in chapters 7 and 8.)
	Pateman, C. (1979) The Problem of Political Obligation, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. (Discusses the history and many varieties of consent theory in chapters 4–7, favouring a Rousseauian version.)
	Pitkin, H. (1965–6) ‘Obligation and Consent, I and II’, American Political Science Review 59 (4): 990–999, 60 (1): 39–52. (Develops a hypothetical consent theory of political obligation.)
	Plamenatz, J.P. (1968) Consent, Freedom and Political Obligation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn. (Discussion of consent theory, with a defence of voting as an expression of consent in the ‘Postscript’.)
	Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Powerful defence of political justification by appeal to hypothetical consent, with the implications for political obligation in chapter 6.)
	Simmons, A.J. (1993) On the Edge of Anarchy: Locke, Consent, and the Limits of Society, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Discussion of Locke and the implications of consent theory in chapters 3, 4, 7 and 8; extensive bibliography.)
	Walzer, M. (1970) Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War, and Citizenship, New York: Simon & Schuster. (Applies a distinctive conception of consent theory to various practical political problems.)
	Weale, A. (1978) ‘Consent’, Political Studies 26 (1): 65–77. (Analysis of consent in terms of inducing reliance.)