At a point in history marked by dramatic challenges to the existing political and social order, the question of legal and political obligation emerges as a focal point of international concern. Amid the clamor for radical change in the established order, theories of political obligation demand renewed examination. In this volume, eighteen leading specialists in the legal, philosophical, and political science aspects of the question offer their views on this timely topic.

Part I examines the nature of moral, legal, and political obligation. The first essay presents a set of...

A vast and complicated array of subject matter is subjected to analysis, comment, and speculation by fifteen contributors representing three separate but contiguous disciplines. Their approaches are as various as one would expect. One is concerned with the bonds that hold associations together, and another with the tendency for the private to become public. One sees associations as interferences with democratic political processes, while another is more impressed by their positive values. Still another shows that the way in which they operate in the political process depends not only on...

In the United States, there exists increasing uneasiness about the predominance of self-interest in both public and private life, growing fear about the fragmentation and privatization of American society, mounting concerns about the effects of institutions--ranging from families to schools to the media--on the character of young people, and a renewed tendency to believe that without certain traditional virtues neither public leaders nor public policies are likely to succeed. In this thirty-fourth volume in The American Society of Legal and Political Philosophy, a distinguished...