Loyalty to the state is a phrase invoked often and examined rarely. In Pakistan’s political discourse it is used as a cudgel, a demand made of citizens, of dissenters, of critics, as though loyalty were an unconditional debt owed by the governed to those who govern. But the history of political thought tells a very different story. Loyalty to the state was never conceived as loyalty to the men who occupy its offices, nor to the “system” they preside over. It was conceived as obedience to a compact, and today, that compact is written down and called a constitution. To understand why obedience to the Constitution, and not to the whims of power centres, constitutes true loyalty to the state, it is worth returning to the foundations on which the very idea of the state was built.
Thomas Hobbes, writing in the aftermath of the English Civil War, gave the modern world its first systematic account of why states exist at all. In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes imagined human beings in a “state of nature”, a condition without government, without law, and without any common power to keep them in awe. In that condition, he wrote, life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, because every man was at war with every other man in pursuit of scarce resources, glory, and self-preservation. There was no industry, no cultivation of the earth, no navigation, no arts, no society, only the constant fear and danger of violent death.
To escape this condition, Hobbes argued, individuals entered into a social contract with one another, surrendering their natural right to all things and transferring it to a single sovereign authority, the “Leviathan”, who alone would possess the power to enforce peace and command obedience. This sovereign, whether a monarch or an assembly, was granted near-absolute authority precisely because the alternative, the state of nature, was intolerable. For Hobbes, the state was born out of necessity: authority existed to prevent chaos, and citizens owed it obedience because it alone stood between them and anarchy.
Hobbes’s genius was to explain why states exist. His limitation, one that later thinkers would correct, was his near-total subordination of the individual to the sovereign, with scarcely any right of resistance even against tyranny. The Leviathan was created to protect life, but Hobbes left little room to ask what happens when the sovereign itself becomes the source of harm rather than protection.
It fell to John Locke, writing a few decades later in his Two Treatises of Government, to supply that correction, and in doing so, to reshape the entire justification for political obedience. Locke agreed that government arises from a social contract, but he insisted that individuals possess natural rights to life, liberty, and property that exist prior to, and independently of, government. These rights are not gifts of the sovereign; they belong to human beings by nature, and no government creates them.
For Locke, the purpose of forming civil society was not to escape into submission before an all-powerful ruler, but to secure a neutral, impartial mechanism for protecting rights that already existed but were insecure in the state of nature. Government, in this framing, is a trustee, not a master. Political power is delegated by the people for the specific purpose of preserving their rights, and that delegation carries an implicit condition: the trust remains valid only so long as the trustee honours it.
The central point of Locke’s contribution is that loyalty to the state is not unconditional. It is contingent on the state’s continued performance of the very function for which it was instituted, the safeguarding of the rights of its citizens. When a government breaches that trust, when it acts against the rights and interests of the people rather than for them, Locke held that it forfeits the obedience owed to it, and the right of resistance, even revolution, revives in the hands of the people. Rights, in other words, take precedence over loyalty to the state; loyalty is the derivative, not the foundation.
A century later, Sir William Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, gave this Lockean insight its most elegant juridical expression, one that would go on to shape common-law constitutionalism across the English-speaking world, Pakistan’s own legal inheritance included. Blackstone wrote:
“The principal aim of society is to protect individuals in the enjoyment of those absolute rights, which were vested in them by the immutable laws of nature, but which could not be preserved in peace without that mutual assistance and intercourse which is gained by the institution of friendly and social communities. Hence it follows, that the first and primary end of human laws is to maintain and regulate these absolute rights of individuals. Such rights as are social and relative result from, and are posterior to, the formation of states and societies: so that to maintain and regulate these is clearly a subsequent consideration. And, therefore, the principal view of human laws is, or ought always to be, to explain, protect, and enforce such rights as are absolute.”
The structure of Blackstone’s argument matters as much as its content. Absolute rights, those vested in individuals by the immutable laws of nature, are prior in time and prior in importance. Social and relative rights, including the very apparatus of the state, its institutions, and its offices, are posterior; they are instruments created to serve the absolute rights, not ends in themselves. Human law exists, first and primarily, to protect the individual. Everything else, the machinery of governance, the hierarchy of offices, the “system,” to use a word much in vogue in Pakistan today, is a subsequent, derivative consideration.
Read together, Hobbes, Locke, and Blackstone trace a single arc: the state is instituted to end the war of all against all, but it earns its authority, and the citizen’s obedience, only by protecting the rights it was created to protect. When a constitution codifies these arrangements, separating powers, entrenching fundamental rights, subjecting the state itself to law, obedience to that constitution becomes the modern name for loyalty to the state. Loyalty to individuals who happen to hold office, or to a “system” divorced from constitutional restraint, is not loyalty to the state at all. It is loyalty to power for its own sake, precisely the confusion Locke and Blackstone warned against.
Obedience to the Constitution is loyalty to the state because the Constitution is the only instrument that translates the abstract social contract into an enforceable, mutual obligation: citizens obey the law, and in exchange, the state, including its power centers, governs within the limits the Constitution sets, and answers when it does not. A power center that first proclaims imminent prosperity and then proclaims total systemic collapse, without ever locating itself within the causal chain of that collapse, is not asking citizens to be loyal to the state. It is asking them to be loyal to itself, while it remains unaccountable to the very constitutional order it invokes only selectively. That is not loyalty. It is, in the oldest and most literal sense that Locke gave the word, a breach of trust, and it is precisely against such breaches that constitutional obedience, not blind deference to power, was designed to guard.
