Under Construction Journal Issue 6.1 UNDER CONSTRUCTION JOURNAL 6.1 | Page 73

Political Obligation and Why We Must Obey the State: Comparing Ibn Khaldūn and Hobbes’s
Understanding of Political Obligation to Appraise the Phenomenon of ‘Philosophical Anarchism’
Today
Mohammed Hanif Khan • PhD in Politics, Keele University
The political philosophy of anarchism can be traced back to Greek antiquity. Diogenes
the Cynic refused to obey the polity, as he argued that the polity was a convention;
therefore, the polity was unnatural. He preferred to live in a barrel, as this distanced
him from the convention of living in a house. However, one of the most influential
examples of political obligation is when Socrates did not escape from prison—after his
death sentence — for corrupting the Athenian youths, despite his disciples planning his
escape. These examples show that the question of whether we must obey the
government is perhaps a timeless question.
Today, we still consider whether the state can legitimately demand our obedience.
Philosophical anarchists—for instance Wolff—argue that the state is illegitimate: it
opposes our moral autonomy, and there are no plausible theories of political
obligation. In this paper, I utilise the political theories of the 14 th Century Muslim
polymath, Ibn Khaldūn, and the 17 th Century British philosopher, Hobbes, to defend
political obligation. I employ their writings to challenge the view of philosophical
anarchists that political obligation does not exist. Accordingly, my premise for the
justification of political obligation is the following: as we can become misanthropic
beings, we need a restraining figure.
In this research, to differentiate between when we must and when we must not obey
the state, I outline the cause of the state, which consists of consequentialism.
Moreover, I comment on how the state is maintained, which comprises of
contractualism. I link the cause of the state, and how the state is maintained to the
state’s objective, which is concerned with teleology, namely, the natural progression
of the state towards its telos. I coin this framework as the three-dimensional model of
political obligation. The research that I have consulted—namely the works of key
researchers of political obligation and philosophical anarchism, such as, Horton, and
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