Loyalty is the virtue, state, or quality of being faithful
to one's commitments, duties, relations, associations,
or values. It is fidelity to a principle, a cause, an idea,
an ideal, a religion or an ideology, a nation or govern-
ment, a party or leader, one's family or friends, a
region, one's race—anyone or anything to which one's
heart can become attached or devoted. One can be
fiercely and consistently loyal, or have the mild and
opportunistic loyalty that marks the “summer soldier
and the sunshine patriot.” One can have an exclusive
loyalty or multiple loyalties. Loyalty can be evoked
by bad as well as by good causes—the Mafia's code,
for example, inculcates absolute loyalty in its members
through rituals, customs, rewards, and punishments.
One expects loyalty from one's spouse, and also from
one's business partners. Loyalty between a superior and
a subordinate in a hierarchical order—as in feudalism—
may be expected, not as a sentiment but as a matter
of institutional custom. In modern times the term has
been used chiefly in association with patriotism, in the
sense of political allegiance and attachment, involving
the obligations, formal and informal, of a citizen to
his country, its government, and its institutions.
Through governmental investigation into loyalty,
through excessive emphasis on loyalty by patriotic
societies, through loyalty oaths, through identification
of loyalty with conformism and support of the status
quo, and through the demand of one hundred percent
patriotism or nationalism as proof of loyalty, the term
has achieved a pejorative sense which must be taken
into account. A totalitarian regime may demand un-
qualified, total loyalty; but chauvinistic elements in a
free society may make similar demands—“our country,
right or wrong.”
A consideration of loyalty necessarily involves con-
sideration of disloyalty, which must also be viewed in
different and shifting contexts, and in a variety of
forms, including treason, sedition, security risk, and
subversion, each in gross and in subtle meanings. It
also involves the history of political theory and morals,
of religious and political persecution and martyrdom,
the history of ideologies, philosophies of history, in-
deed, involves the whole range of the history of civili-
zation and culture. We can point only selectively to
some of the chief lines of its meaning, use, and abuse.
