 In the face of these problems, Matthew Noah Smith has recently tried to rescue the a priori skepticism of Wolff’s theory by substituting the overriding importance of “the moral status of the subject’s self” (2011, p. 2) for Wolff’s reliance on the fundamental duty of autonomy. According to Smith, preserving the status of the self is incompatible with the law’s claim to authority, because “the obligation to obey the law would morally require otherwise morally upstanding subjects to undergo a radical form of self-effacement in favor of recreating themselves in the image of foreign values” (p. 2; see p. 9 for an admittedly “florid” way of making this point). Whether the law is properly understood as an “alien force” that threatens “to fix who one is” (p. 14), however, is a point that critics of a priori anarchism are not likely to concede. Indeed, the radically individualistic conception of the self that underpins Smith’s argument is one that proponents of the membership or associative theory of political obligation (see §4.3, below) will dismiss from the outset. It seems unlikely, then, that Smith’s adaptation will develop the “traction” that, on his account, Wolff’s has failed to gain.