Obligation, Loyalty, Exile
1993; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1177/0090591793021002003
ISSN1552-7476
Autores Tópico(s)Migration, Refugees, and Integration
ResumoThis is a work in progress. Not even a respectable title. I began work on political obligation and loyalty with a view to getting away from my preoccupation with political evil, but I soon found out better. It began harmlessly enough as a project to figure out the differences between political obligation and political loyalty. I turned to exiles only thanks to a chance conversation, which made me recognize that exiles because their situation is so extreme constitute a perfect limiting case for illustrating the nuances and implications of all the notions related to both obligation and loyalty. That is how I got to the topic. To be sure, I have long been interested in betrayal, and exiles are often created by governments that betray their own citizens. Governments also frequently abuse residents under their jurisdiction by denying them membership in the polity and other rights, not as a matter of legal punishment but because they belong to a group that is thought to be inherently unfit for inclusion. These people are also exiles. In fact, the more one thinks about them, the more numerous the forms of exile turn out to be. Exile itself is but a part of a larger social category, ranging from the forcibly excluded to people who exile themselves without moving by escaping into themselves, as it were, because their world is so politically evil. I came to look all the way from coerced exiles to inner emigrants. In spite of the difficulties and scope of the topic, I remain certain that exiles not only offer us a concrete way of examining the meaning of obligation and
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