Abstract

Legal and political philosophers of a normative bent face an uphill struggle in keeping themes of global justice and cosmopolitan governance, at the forefront of their disciplinary debate, given the perceived urgency of confronting, at the domestic level, the populist upsurge in mature democracies and “democratizing societies” alike. In this paper, these two levels of analysis—national and transnational—mutually enrich one another through a reflection on the ground of legitimacy. In the first section (“Perfectionism Redux”), (a) neo-perfectionist approaches to the legitimation of transnational authority (rooted in Kantian or Hegelian notions, or in some natural law conception of human rights) and (b) public reason approaches rooted in the paradigm of “political liberalism” will be contrasted. In the second section (“From Balance to Separation of Powers”), a non-perfectionist and normative conception of the legitimacy of transnational authorities will be derived from Rawls’s “liberal principle of legitimacy” (renamed “legitimation by constitution by F. Michelman) and the difference with the application of the same principle at the domestic level will be elucidated. In the third section (“Legitimacy and the Flourishing of Humanity: Buchanan and Keohane on Global Institutions”), on the basis of such conception, one of the most complete and influential approaches to the legitimacy of transnational authorities—i.e., the “Complex Standard of Legitimacy” expounded by A. Buchanan and R. Keohane in “The Legitimacy of Global Governance Institutions”—will be critically assessed.

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