 Until recently, most political philosophers have assumed that subjects of a (moderately just) state have political obligations, while disputing why that is so. Indeed, in the middle years of the twentieth century some philosophers even asserted, on conceptual grounds, that political obligation needs no justification. As one of them put the point, “to ask why I should obey any laws is to ask whether there might be a political society without political obligations, which is absurd. For we mean by political society, groups of people organized according to rules enforced by some of their number” (Macdonald 1951, p. 192; also McPherson 1967, p. 64, and, more subtly, Pitkin 1966; but cf. Pateman 1973, and Horton 2010, pp. 138–46). This view did not long prevail, but it testifies to the strength of the tendency to believe that citizens surely have an obligation to obey the laws of their country, at least if it is reasonably just.