1 Political authority and obligation Political authority and obligation

Political authority and obligation 15
BOX 1.2 PLATO, LOCKE, HUME, AND ROUSSEAU ON RESIDENCE AS CONSENT
And if any one of you wishes to go to a colony, if he is not satisfied with us and the city, or to
migrate and settle in another country, none of us, the laws, hinder or forbid him going whithersoever
he pleases, taking with him all his property. But whoever continues with us after he has
seen the manner in which we administer justice, and in other respects govern the city, we now
say, that he has in fact entered into a compact with us, to do what we order.
(Plato, 360 BC; 1892: 41)
Every man that hath any possession or enjoyment of any part of the dominions of any government
doth hereby give his tacit consent, and is as far forth obliged to obedience to the laws of
that government, during such enjoyment, as any one under it, whether this his possession be of
land to him and his heirs for ever, or a lodging only for a week; or whether it be barely travelling
freely on the highway; and, in effect, it reaches as far as the very being of any one within the territories
of that government.
(Locke, 1690; 1924: 177)
Can we seriously say that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his country, when
he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives, from day to day, by the small wages which
he acquires? We may as well assert that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the
dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the
ocean, and perish, the moment he leaves her.
(Hume, 1748; 1947: 221–2)
After the state is instituted, residence implies consent; to inhabit the territory is to submit to the
sovereign. [Footnote:] This should always be understood to refer only to free states, for elsewhere
family, property, lack of asylum, necessity or violence may keep an inhabitant in the
country unwillingly, and then his mere residence no longer implies consent either to the contract
or to the violation of the contract.
(Rousseau, 1762; 1968: 153)
legitimate? It looks, then, as though the residence version of consent theory cannot succeed
without relying on some prior justifi cation for political authority that does not appeal
to tacit consent. If such a justifi cation can be found, then political authority will already
have been shown to be legitimate and consent then becomes redundant.
Voting as consent
A second act that some consent theorists have argued is tacit consent to obey the law is
voting in a democratic election. John Plamenatz, for example, writes that ‘where there is
an established process of election to an offi ce, then, provided the election is free, anyone who
takes part in the process consents to the authority of whoever is elected to the offi ce’ (1968:
170). Of course, not everyone in the world has the opportunity to vote in a democratic
election, and even among those who do, many choose not to exercise it. But can we at
least say that citizens of democratic states who do cast their vote have freely consented
to obey the law?