Consent, Freedom and Political Obligation

The purpose of this book is to provide definitions of a number of words-notably consent, freedom, and rights-generally used by political thinkers, and to discover whether the duty of the governed to obey their governments is, on the whole, greater in proportion to the extent to which the latter act with the consent of the former.

This book was first published in 1938. The first edition has been out of print for some years, but the continuing interest in it, and the difficulty that teachers and students have experienced in tracking down copies, suggest that this new edition will be generally welcomed.

The author would not now advance some of the arguments, or make some of the criticisms, contained in the first edition. To revise the text of that edition would have been to write a different book, and so apart from making a number of verbal alterations the author has left it as it was. However, he has added a substantial new postscript in which he reviews and criticises, often sharply, the text that precedes it. This makes the new edition of considerable interest to readers who already know the book as well as to those who come to it now for the first time.

When this book was first published, J. P. Plamenatz was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is now Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory in the University of Oxford.