Coercion

Claims about coercion play a significant role in some of the most important questions in political philosophy: most ordinary citizens as well as philosophers think that the exercise of power by the state and other political institutions is coercive, and as such requires special justification. Political philosophy, it has been assumed, must assess both the truth of that claim and its relevance for whether or not states, in general, can be justified. Whether the state (or its law) is always or necessarily coercive is a central question in the philosophy of law. Under what conditions a state exercising coercive power can be justified is the question that informs all major works in the social contract tradition since Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan.