Legitimacy as an Existential Predicament

Abstract

Abstract The question of legitimacy is, in part, a question of who you are, both as a person and as a member of collectives: judging legitimacy is a matter of self-constitution and self-transformation. A struggle for legitimacy is a struggle over collective selfhood. After clarifying concepts of subjectivity, selfhood, and identity, the chapter surveys three ways of understanding the significance of identity for political legitimacy: the foundational, associative, and agonistic picture. No view persuasively captures the dilemmas of judgment in the face of disagreement and uncertainty about who “I” am and who “we” are. The chapter then proposes a composite, pragmatic picture. The pragmatic picture integrates rational, prudential, and ethical qualities of good judgment (consistency, integrity, and responsiveness) that were thus far associated with mutually exclusive ways of theorizing legitimacy. It also implies that the question of legitimacy cannot be resolved philosophically.