Conceptualizing Politics

3.   Political  obligation
By political obligation we understand the obligation that members of the polity 
(subjects or citizens that they may be called) perceive and enact when obeying 
the commands issued by the political authority. It is not safe to say ‘obeying the 
law’ because laws are only the most common, but not the only form taken by the 
will of the political authority (proclamations or decrees were in pre-modern times 
more common and still exist). They do so because they regard the issuing author-
ity as legitimate, which makes political obligation the twin category of legitimacy. 
This nexus is valid only within the polity, that is a stable and cohesive association 
shaped by legal norms – as already Cicero (BCE 106–43) defined the res publica or 
commonwealth (De Re Publica I, 25, 39). In a chaotic and lawless situation, neither 
legitimacy nor political obligation makes sense. These twin categories lie at the 
ground of the very existence of the polity: without sense of obligation on the part 
of its members, there would be no polity, no order – as we shall soon see – and 
permanent civil strife, disunion, lack of cooperation would make everybody’s life a 
nightmare, as proved by the reality of failed states. Yet only those who acknowledge 
some legitimacy of the ruling instances are ready to act according to the laws as 
well as to sanction those who do not – once again legitimacy turns out to be an 
indispensable element of a functioning and stable power structure. Beyond being a 
constitutive element of political power, the nexus legitimacy-obligation is also an 
important limit to it.
Political obligation is not to be mistaken for the moral or legal one. Unlike the 
latter, it does not entail coercive sanctions for those who infringe upon it and may 
abstain from doing so because they are convinced the regime is legitimate, not just 
for fear of being fined or landing in prison. Unlike moral obligation, political obli-
gation is a matter of behaviour, not of the intimate belief in the rightness or sanctity 
of a polity or policy; nor needs to be re-examined in every situation, since belief in 
legitimacy and sense of obligation are subject to stabilisation as permanent beliefs, 
until new upsetting questions and conditions arise. This is only one of the many 
occasions on which acting politically reveals its difference from thinking morally, 
which makes the simplistic replacement of political reasoning by moral argument – 
as often the case with normativist thinkers – miss the specificity of politics.
* * *
At the end of our journey through power and legitimacy we are finally able to 
answer the question already raised in Chapter 1: is politics entirely a sombre matter 
of conflicts, scarcity, power, force, in which the actors’ self-interest shapes all that 
happens? Is there no place for ideas and ideals?
This has been an immensely controversial question in the history of philosophy, 
and we cannot possibly recapitulate centuries of debate. I shall limit myself to one 
possible answer, which has evolutionary character and reorders elements already illus-
trated on our journey; something more will be said in the Epilogue to this volume.

---

34  What is politics?
While politics, or more generally any regulation of human community life since 
its inception, has never severed its roots lying in the conflict for material and posi-
tional resources, it has soon generated debates on conflicting patterns of distri-
bution and corresponding models of good governance, which we have seen to 
be an essential component of power’s legitimation. To begin with, these patterns 
and models display, even if rarely in a conceptualized language, the significant link 
between political power and religion, especially monotheism – a link we cannot 
unfortunately explore in a systematic way. This happened already in ancient texts 
such as the Behistun inscription near Kermanshah (Iran), in which Darius I the 
Great, king of Persia from BCE 522–486, celebrated the feats of his reign and 
acknowledged the support given to him by Ahuramazda, the supreme deity of 
Zoroastrianism; that link was loosed or severed only in recent centuries, but some-
times strongly reinstated, as in Iran since 1989. In Western civilisation philosophy, 
religion and law (meaning both the institutionalisation of the rules regulating con-
flicts and the inquiry into their foundation) focused more and more on the prin-
ciples underlying the political order already in existence or the one hoped for, in a