ABSTRACT
Political philosophers have prescribed complex social and institutional arrangements designed to alter the behavior if not the nature of man, and more descriptively inclined investigators have deployed industry and ingenuity in paring away differentia and showing that man is in fact a simpler and more orderly phenomenon than he has understood himself to be. Men continue to think of themselves as rational, deliberative agents able to evaluate and continue to frame and act upon intentions and purposes. This chapter shows that this understanding is no less appropriate or valuable in the area of political obligation than in any other realm of political life. It discusses the important and unimportant legal rules that direct attention to a related but different class of cases; that in which men obey particular rules out of habit or in some other unreflective or uncritical manner, that is, in just the manner that the distinction between ideals and obligation might suggest they should and do.
