 This essay begins, therefore, with a brief history of the problem of political obligation. It then turns, in Part 2, to the conceptual questions raised by political obligation, such as what it means for an obligation to be political. In Part 3 the focus is on the skeptics, with particular attention to the self-proclaimed philosophical anarchists, who deny that political obligations exist yet do not maintain that the state is necessarily unjustifiable. Part 4 surveys the leading contenders among the various theories of political obligation now on offer, and Part 5 concludes the essay with a consideration of recent proposals for pluralistic or “multiple principle” approaches.