Political Legitimacy as an Existential Predicament

Thomas Fossen

doi:10.1177/00905917211047842

Abstract

This essay contributes to developing a new approach to political legitimacy by asking what is involved in judging the legitimacy of a regime from a practical point of view. It is focused on one aspect of this question: the role of identity in such judgment. I examine three ways of understanding the significance of identity for political legitimacy: the foundational, associative, and agonistic picture. Neither view, I claim, persuasively captures the dilemmas of judgment in the face of disagreement and uncertainty about who “I” am and who “we” are. I then propose a composite, pragmatic picture. This view casts the question of political legitimacy as an existential predicament: it is fundamentally a question about who you are—both as a person and as a member of collectives. The pragmatic picture integrates rational, prudential, and ethical qualities of good judgment that were heretofore associated with mutually exclusive ways of theorizing legitimacy. It also implies that the question of legitimacy cannot be resolved philosophically.

Highlights

Introduction“The people demand the fall of the regime,” crowds chanted at Tahrir Square in Cairo in early 2011
This essay contributes to developing a new approach to political legitimacy by asking what is involved in judging the legitimacy of a regime from a practical point of view
Philosophers usually approach this as a problem of moral knowledge, seeking to articulate and justify principles that the authorities ought to meet to be legitimate (e.g., Applbaum 2019; Peter 2020). Realist critics regard such moralism as out of touch with political reality. Those who propose constructive alternatives typically search for criteria that are in some sense distinctively “political” (e.g., Sleat 2014; Cozzaglio and Greene 2019)

Summary

Introduction

“The people demand the fall of the regime,” crowds chanted at Tahrir Square in Cairo in early 2011. This picture stresses the ontological significance of identity: the existence of political relationships of a certain kind constitutes a reason for treating a regime as legitimate (Gilbert 2006; Renzo 2012; Horton and Windeknecht 2015) Judging legitimacy on this picture is a matter of interpreting accurately the concrete relations of power and affiliation in which governed subjects find themselves. Insofar as by resisting who we are taken to be, we constitute and characterize ourselves differently, identity becomes a product of our own judgmental activity In this picture, judging legitimacy consists not in applying a given moral norm or a concept of community but in a groundless act of self-overcoming. If each of the core ideas captures something important—the inferential and ontological significance of identity and its inherent questionability— it seems that judgment must, yet cannot, be grounded in identity (be it personal or collective)

A Pragmatic Picture

Conclusion