FOR THIS LECTURE NO FULL TEXT could be found in the Shklar Papers at the Harvard Archives or among the teaching materials elsewhere. The only available material consisted of keywords, which the teaching assistants were asked to use as board material. They are reproduced here to give the reader a sense of the course of the overall argument.
Democracy and tacit consent:1
1. Right to emigrate
2. Participation and procedures for fair compromises
3. Voting, litigating signals of consent
Nonvoters consent to:
1. Elite chooses leaders, rest consent passively
2. Consent is to government that protects natural rights
Do minorities consent and to what?
Against consent:
1. Applies only in face-to-face societies
2. Elections express preferences, not consent
3. Coercion is not consent
Fair play: benefits of cooperation
Gratitude: for benefits of political order
Graded by amount of benefit?
Are we obliged by individual laws as laws?
No: only moral content obliges
Yes:
1. Law sets political norms among strangers
2. Sets public penalties because it is a social in addition to moral norm
3. Part of legal system
Obligation to imperfectly just democratic system:
1. Procedures for politics of bargaining among strangers
2. Justice and liberty as recognized public ends.
Shared standards of judging public conduct.
1. Two published variations of this text appear in Political Thought and Political Thinkers. The lecture we present here was clearly part of Shklar’s political obligation course, and it contains some noticeable differences when compared with the two previously published texts.