Questions of political obligation are at the heart of both practical politics and political ideas. They deal with power, authority, right, rule over oneself and over others. When is one bound by collective decisions? On what basis rests this obligation? What are its limits?
Such and similar concerns were the main reasons why political theorist Judith Shklar chose to frame her last course at Harvard before her untimely death in the autumn of 1992 chiefly in those terms (these lectures, edited and introduced by Samantha Ashenden and Andreas Hess, have just been published with Yale University Press).
For Shklar it was important to convey to her students “the conviction that a complete person must be able to think intelligently about government” and that doing so meant finding out “how political ideas fit into the republic of letters generally, [and] into the political system within which they took place.”
