While writing this book, I moved between two types of interests and audiences with which I sense a connection: between political involvement and academic work, between the Israeli public and the community of Anglo-American philosophers. The former served mainly to feed my passions and supply my project with an urgent sense of purpose. The latter provided it with tradition, tools, discipline and tone.

For a few consecutive years during the early eighties I dealt with the duty to obey the law in several courses I taught at Tel Aviv University. The books and articles comprising my syllabus expressed a position on which an almost total consensus had been consolidated among philosophers during the seventies. According to this position there is no duty to obey the law, mainly because none of the arguments offered in its support proves it to be universally applicable. Though I agreed then and still agree with many of the details of this position, it nonetheless troubled me. My discomfort stemmed mainly from the disintegrative reading of the arguments for the duty to obey criticized by those holding the view in question; from the unnecessarily strict construal of the concept of generic duties which the position presupposes; and from the embarrassing gap between the radical look of this thesis and the tameness of its practical implications. I was also bothered by the absence of a rigorous discussion of the conclusions on the limits of the duty to obey, following from its particular grounds.