If you have ever been commanded, or ever commanded another, you already stand within the subject of this book. A human being can be pushed, frightened, persuaded, trained, rewarded, confined, classified, manipulated, managed, or made to comply. Yet when another being presents compliance as owed, the encounter raises a question that successful control alone cannot answer:
Why must I?
I may comply because refusal would be painful, because the speaker knows more than I do, because an office has long been recognized, because the law threatens a penalty, or because resistance would be futile. Such facts can explain my conduct without establishing anyone’s right to require it. Being moved is not the same as being bound; being made to comply is not the same as being answerable for refusal.
The distinction is familiar even where it goes unnamed. Force can wear the mask of obligation, habit can look like duty, and procedure can pose as legitimacy. Even fear can speak in the voice of respect. The outward act of obedience may look the same whether a human being acknowledges a rightful demand or yields because there is no tolerable alternative.
The words you must pass through all these encounters: at home, in court, in church, in the barracks, in the hospital, at work, in the quiet of conscience. A prediction says what will happen; a preference expresses what someone wants; advice recommends a course; a threat announces what refusal may bring. When you must presents conduct as owed, it presents the being addressed as answerable for compliance or refusal. This is Binding Address. Whoever presents the demand as binding occupies the claimant-position. Where the claimant also asserts an entitlement to demand, decide, authorize, or enforce, title names that entitlement. Two claims then stand together: that the conduct is owed, and that this claimant is entitled to require it.
For the human being facing the demand, What will happen if I refuse? and Can I resist? may be urgent questions. But even complete answers concerning consequences and Power leave another question standing:
By what right?
Suppose the answer is, “You must obey because I am stronger.” The danger may give me an excellent reason to comply. Prudence concerns what serves my safety, interests, or advantage under the circumstances; it can counsel submission where resistance would be ruinous. But the wisdom of avoiding injury supplies no title to the claimant making the threat. My reason to yield and that claimant’s right to command require different explanations.
Between obedience produced and obedience owed, political philosophy begins.
Volume 0 examines the claim made within that space: what kind of act is performed when one being addresses another as bound, what must that act satisfy, and by what standard can its success be judged?
An institution has no exemption from the question put to the individual who commands. Its existence may explain who speaks and how the demand is enforced; its right to bind remains to be established. To begin by granting that right would settle the decisive question before examining it. The demand itself gives us the starting point: a being is addressed as bound.