be seen by nearly everyone as a totally unacceptable proposal, whereas with
capital punishment and nuclear weapons it is ultimately impossible to com-
promise. Therefore pure consensus may rarely exist, but there are objective
examples which serve as useful political benchmarks.
Consent
Many political theories, in attempting to answer the central question ‘Why
should anyone obey the government?’, fall back on the idea that this obligation
is based on an implicit or explicit consent to the exercise ofauthorityby the
government or state in question. The belief that man is ‘by nature’ free and
independent has led some political thinkers to argue that a free individual
cannot be obliged to obey any ruler without freely wishing, willing or agreeing
to do so. This sort of doctrine, perhaps best represented by the 17th-century
English political philosopher JohnLocke, is usually associated withsocial
contracttheories. These picture society as set up deliberately by independent
individuals who come to see that their own interests are best served by
collaboration, and who therefore freely give up some of their independence
to a government so that it can function for their benefit. Clearly, given this
position, the right of a government to pass laws and coerce citizens can only
stem from the citizens having given their willing consent to obey. However,
the theory, though admirable, is riddled with problems which political
theorists are still trying to solve. To start with, in reality the average citizen
is never given a chance to consent or withhold consent, although one might
argue that the voluntary acceptance of citizenship when someone is naturalized
is such an event. There is, too, the argument that if the government is either
looking after your interests, or doing what is ‘right’, it does not seem to make
much difference whether you have consented or not. Locke himself had to
stretch his definition of ‘consent’ so far in order to make his theory work
logically that it ceased to have quite the force it might seem to carry. He
introduced the notion of ‘tacit consent’ by which anyone who takes advantage
of the laws of a society by travelling on the state’s highways, for example, must
be seen to have consented. Modern versions of this sort of consent argue that
voting in an election, and thus availing oneself of a power that would not
automatically be available, is to consent, even if one’s preferred party loses.
Nevertheless, the idea that obligation can be incurred only through consent
remains very attractive, and is still a powerful force in democratic or liberal
political theory.
Conservatism
Conservatism is a political theory which is peculiarly difficult to define because
one aspect of conservative thought is its rejection of explicitideologyand its
Conservatism