ABSTRACT
The purpose of this paper is to consider the claim that there is a contradiction, tension, or inverse relationship between political coercion and political obligation. More specifically, I will examine the adequacy of two claims: first, that if one consents to a political system, that system is not coercive, and therefore men may have obligations to it; second, that because membership in the polity is involuntary and coercive–without consent–one could not have political obligations. Both claims assume an incompatibility between political obligation and political coercion, and neither claim stands up for the following reasons: the conception of the sources of obligation upon which these claims rest is too limited; the consent theory is virtually irrelevant in the modern polity; the terms in which political coercion are usually defined are misleading and biased; and neither claim sufficiently accounts for the relationship between the political and the economic systems.
