Liberal consent-based obligation cannot easily survive the decline of state sovereignty.

Evidence

Given that the subject was to be seen as an individual sovereign in a sovereign state, Tuck points to the dilemma that now faced liberal theory. Liberals, he writes, have usually distinguished between two principles of conduct: On the one hand, there are principles to which subjects have assented, whether directly or indirectly, and to which they therefore owe their political obligation. These include social custom, the law, and the constitution. On the other hand, there are principles of obligatory conduct that do not derive from consent. These are not many, and they form a “thin” account of morality—a minimum requirement of the kind of sociality in which individual autonomy is closely linked to collective violence. “However, a great deal of writing and talking about international affairs in our time supposes that there is an international community which polices its members and enforces quite a complex and contentious set of values upon them, and many people who are ‘liberal’ in domestic politics often favour such an idea. If what used to be the paradigm case of the liberal agent, the independent state, is now seen as inevitably enmeshed in complicated social settings; if sovereignty is widely treated (as it is in Europe, if not in North America) as an outdated and uninformative category for states; then that traditional cousin of the sovereign state, the sovereign individual, is going to be hard to conceptualize with the old vividness.” — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 648

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the declining-sovereignty argument tradition in international law and legal pluralism literature.
• QUESTION: Who is Tuck, and which work is Asad citing here? Worth tracing.