 Locke does agree with Hobbes, of course, in deriving obligations to obey the law from the consent of the governed. In developing his argument, however, he reveals several problems that have bedeviled social contract theory. One has to do with the nature of the contract: is it historical or hypothetical? If the former, then the problem is to show that most people truly have entered into such a contract (at least if one’s aim is to show that most people have a duty to obey the law). If the contract is meant to be a device that illustrates how people would have given their consent, on the other hand, then the difficulty is that a hypothetical contract “is no contract at all” (Dworkin, 1977, p. 151). Two more problems concern how to characterize acts that count as consent. Though Hobbes maintains that submission to a conqueror qualifies as such an act, few are now likely to accept that agreement at the point of a sword gives rise to a moral obligation to obey (as opposed to a prudential reason to do so). Indeed, it is not clear that consent is really the key to political obligation in Hobbes’s theory; rather, we have an obligation to obey anyone who can maintain order. As for Locke, he seems to stretch the notion of tacit consent too far when he states, in §119 of the Second Treatise, that the “very being of anyone within the territories” expresses a person’s willing submission to the rule of its government.