ABSTRACT
This chapter examines loyalty as a civic virtue and demonstrates that sign reasoning advances disloyalty claims through the rhetorical topos of the visible and the invisible. It argues that the rise of the lone-wolf terrorist has made invisible signs increasingly salient. Among the flammable elements, loyalty is dry kindling because its virtuous status rests on problematic, contingent relationships that inevitably clash with rights-based limits on sovereign authority. Scholars often conceive the concept of loyalty as a public obligation, a moral virtue with a dispositional attachment to some end apart from the self. Like Oceania and the political philosophy of Ingsoc, the post-9/11 world of lone-wolf terrorism relies on increasingly robust systems of surveillance to make visible those signs of disloyalty. The chapter concludes that invisibility is a key premise in justifying aggressive counterterrorism policies as a defensible exception to liberal democratic norms.
