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Obligation, political

DOI
10.4324/9780415249126-S042-1
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DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-S042-1
Version: v1,  Published online: 1998
Retrieved March 28, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/obligation-political/v-1

2. Communitarian theories

Drawing their inspiration from Plato, Aristotle, Hegel and Wittgenstein, communitarians argue that our plans and purposes, our values, and thus essential aspects of our very identities, are given us by the roles we play within linguistic, social and political communities (see Community and communitarianism). It is as a result misleading to think (as individualists do) of our moral relation to the state as somehow optional or contingent. Citizen and state are not like unrelated contractors in economic negotiations, as voluntarists seem to maintain. Nor do our political obligations rest on externally derived moral duties, as nonvoluntarists claim. Rather we have obligations to obey the rules of our communities because this is part of what it means to be members of those communities. Who we are in our social contexts tells us what obligations we have. To ask for any further explanation of political obligation would be to ask the unintelligible question: why should our lives be regulated by what makes us what we are (Green 1882). The proper account of political obligation looks to justifications that are internal to our practices, not external to them.

Communitarians whose sympathies are Wittgensteinian typically advance some version of a conceptual argument: that political obligation is conceptually tied to membership in a particular political society, and that membership is not voluntary, optional or contingent upon external justifiability (Pitkin 1965–6; Horton 1992). Comparisons are often drawn between political obligations and family obligations (which are similarly nonvoluntary) or obligations to friends and colleagues (which we often ‘acquire’ rather than choose, and which we continue to have even when we do not want them). Lest we think these analogies appeal only to nonliberal theorists, it should be noted that they have motivated at least one well-known political liberal to offer an account of political obligation as an ‘associative’ or ‘communal’ obligation (Dworkin 1986).

Communitarians whose sympathies are more Aristotelian or Hegelian tend to modify or add to these conceptual arguments. Political community, they argue, is essential to human flourishing and the development of human moral capacities, such as agency or autonomy or self-conscious valuation. As such, not only are our political communities owed obedience and support (as long as they encourage this development); we have also an obligation to belong to and facilitate political communities (Taylor 1979). On this view, because our political relations contribute essentially to our identities as moral agents and autonomous choosers, these relations cannot themselves be thought of as freely chosen or as dependent on moral principles that bind us independent of our political roles. While feminist political philosophy has not focused centrally on the problem of political obligation, most feminist accounts are also broadly communitarian or ‘contextual’ in character (Hirschmann 1992).

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Citing this article:
Simmons, A. John. Communitarian theories. Obligation, political, 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-S042-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/obligation-political/v-1/sections/communitarian-theories.
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