This paper examines the differences between moralist, realist, and pragmatist approaches to political legitimacy by articulating their largely implicit views of judgment. Three claims are advanced. First, the salient opposition among approaches to legitimacy is not between “moralism” and “realism.” Recent realist proposals for rethinking legitimacy share with moralist views a distinctive form, called “normativism”: a quest for knowledge of principles that solve the question of legitimacy. This assumes that judging legitimacy is a matter of applying such principles to a (...) case at hand. Second, neither Rawls nor Habermas is a normativist about political legitimacy. The principles of legitimacy they proffer claim to express rather than adjudicate the legitimacy of a liberal-democratic regime, and thus cannot solve the question of legitimacy at a fundamental level. But perhaps we should question the normativist aspiration to theoretically resolving the problem to begin with. My third claim is that a “pragmatist” approach enables us to rethink political legitimacy more deeply by shifting focus from the articulation of principles to the activity of judging. Implicit in Rawls’s and Habermas’s theories I then find clues towards an alternative account of judgment, in which the question of legitimacy calls not for theoretical resolution but for ongoing practical engagement. (shrink)

Eva Erman and Niklas Möller have recently criticised a range of political theorists for committing a pragmatistic fallacy, illicitly drawing normative conclusions from politically neutral ideas abo...

Realism criticizes the idea, central to what may be called ‘the priority view’, that philosophy has the task of imposing from the outside general norms of morality or standards of reasonableness on politics understood as the domain of power. According to realism, political philosophy must reveal the specific standards internal to the political practice of handling power appropriately and as it develops in actual circumstances. Framed in those terms, the debate evokes the idea that political power itself is lacking normativity (...) until such time as norms are devised that govern its use. In contrast, this essay identifies a normative dimension internal to power. Power depends on recognition and support in the form of belief. This dependence explains how an interest in power introduces a responsiveness to normative considerations into the domain of politics. (shrink)

This essay presents a new way of conceptualizing the problem of political obligation. On the traditional ‘normativist’ framing of the issue, the primary task for theory is to secure the content and justification of political obligations, providing practically applicable moral knowledge. This paper develops an alternative, ‘pragmatist’ framing of the issue, by rehabilitating a frequently misunderstood essay by Hanna Pitkin and by recasting her argument in terms of the ‘pragmatic turn’ in recent philosophy, as articulated by Robert Brandom. From this (...) perspective, the content and justification of political obligations cannot be determined in a way that is in principle separable from their application. This casts ‘political obligation’ not as a problem to be philosophically resolved, but as a political predicament that calls for a kind of practical engagement. The merit of this perspective is to draw our attention toward the conditions under which the problem appears as a lived predicament. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

The Practical Turn in Political Theory sounds like the monograph political theorists have been waiting for – a monograph that identifies ‘practices’ as a uniting theme that runs through several recently influential debates on non-ideal theory, practice dependence, realism and pragmatist theories of legitimacy and democracy, and then discusses the promise and limits of this uniting theme for the future of political theory. However, The Practical Turn is driven by selective portrayals, omissions and misrepresentation, and hence is not a good (...) source to turn to for understanding the debates it surveys or whether they manifest a ‘practical turn in political theory’ or not; rather, it serves as a warning of how struggles over power can influence and even structure seemingly the most purely intentioned of practices. (shrink)

Several critics of realist theories of political legitimacy have alleged that it possesses a problematic bias towards the status quo. This bias is thought to be reflected in the way in which these...

Though historically important, the notion of tacit consent plays little role in contemporary discussions of political legitimacy. The idea, in fact, is often dismissed as obviously implausible. The ambition of this paper is to challenge this assumption and show that tacit consent can become a key ingredient in a theory of legitimacy. Instead of defining tacit consent through residence (where, according to John Locke or Plato's Socrates, staying in the country amounts to tacitly consenting to its system of rule), the (...) paper explores a different strategy, delimiting tacit consent as an absence of active dissent. The basic idea starts from the fact that widespread anti-government protests and demonstrations always carry a potent delegitimating force. Political legitimacy is therefore never permanent and unchangeable, regardless of the nature of the regime, and can be undermined at all times by active dissent from the population. Having established the relationship between dissent and delegitimation of political power, even the inverted, stronger claim is defended: the absence of active dissent (i.e., tacit consent) can, under certain circumstances, serve to legitimize political power. The paper sets up and defends several conditions that need to be met for the right normative mandate to be created by the population tacitly accepting the existing power arrangements. If those are fulfilled (especially when full freedom of expression and information is granted), tacit consent can become a vital element of political legitimacy. (shrink)

This paper seeks to show that Bernard Williams’ approach to legitimacy falls short of its aspirations in ways that cast doubt on its fitness for guiding the practice of future realist political theory. More precisely, the paper focuses on the shortcomings of Williams’ realism in establishing a connection to (the practices of) politics, and on how to redeem those shortcomings in a way that would render them suitable for guiding future realist political theory. The first substantive section of the paper (...) considers how compatible Williams’ commitments to diagnosis and interpretation are, with how he spells out his realist thought. The second section argues that making good on Williams’ commitments requires realist political theorists to rethink the sources of their insights and the basis of their claims, and sketches pragmatist and ethnographic approaches as promising examples of how realists could match theoretical commitments in practice. (shrink)

For political realists, legitimacy is a central requirement for the desirability of political institutions. Their detractors contend that it is either descriptive, and thus devoid of critical potential, or it relies on some moralist value that realists reject. We defend a functionalist reading of realist legitimacy: descriptive legitimacy, that is, the capacity of a political institution to generate beliefs in its right to rule as opposed to commanding through coercion alone, is desirable in virtue of its functional role. First, descriptive (...) legitimacy plays an evaluative role: Institutions can fail to convince citizens that they have a right to rule and can be ranked by how well they do so. Second, descriptive legitimacy plays a normative role, because if an institution fails to convince subjects of its right to rule, this gives them a reason not to comply with its directives, even if it satisfies philosophers’ standards for possessing such right. (shrink)

This paper is guided by two research hypotheses: (1) In contemporary public discourse, many of the most urgent political problems are predominantly framed and understood in moral terms; (2) this shift in framing has far-reaching consequences, impeding our understanding of the underlying problems and their eventual solution. The two hypotheses are demonstrated using multiple examples, with the fight against climate change serving as the main case study. The moral framing (thinking in terms of individual actions, duties and obligations, blame and (...) personal responsibility) is shown to crowd out political considerations (focused on institutions and policy), even when such moral considerations are either out of place or immaterial. Consequently, individual actions and responsibility are shown to be overemphasized in contemporary public discourse to such an extent that the viable political solutions are often discounted or overlooked. The context of the argument offered here is provided by the realism-moralism debate on the distinction between morality and politics. The ambition of the paper is to show that, regardless of their possible deeper distinction (the “distinctively political normativity”), there is a strong pragmatic case for carefully distinguishing between ethical and political theorizing. Morality and politics provide different frames, distinct interpretive frameworks that consequently give rise to contrasting solutions. Therefore, they need to be kept apart. (shrink)

This article surveys recent work in pragmatism and political theory. In doing so, it shows both how recent work on pragmatism has secured the view that at its core is a set of arguments about the character of democracy – although the character of those arguments is open to debate and reimagination – and how pragmatist arguments have been reinterpreted and deployed to address contemporary concerns and approaches. This charts a terrain of live disagreements rather than settled opinion.

Political realists claim that politics should be regulated by a distinctive political normativity, one that does not rely on external, pre-political moral standards. It is in this sense that they distinguish political realism from ‘political moralism’, regarded as an approach that understands political theory as applied ethics. Importantly, realists’ anti-moralism is not motivated by the conviction that moral considerations do not play any role in the political realm. Rather, the target is the externalism of the normative resources on which moralist (...) theories typically ground their conceptions of legitimacy. In contrast to moralists, some realists have argued for the need to elaborate internal theories of legitimacy, ones that develop normativity internally – that is, from within the political context under evaluation. This commitment entails the effort to reconnect legitimacy to the beliefs and attitudes of people subjected to the political power. In these accounts of legitimacy, critique is typically exercised internally, by means of self-reflection and ideology critique. Contra some realists, I argue that some forms of externalism are desirable and compatible with internalist accounts of legitimacy, and I show how to accommodate them within internalist theories of legitimacy. They are desirable because they strengthen the emancipatory potential of internal reflection and, in some cases, even stimulate it, as when, because of political circumstances, internal critique cannot be exercised. In addition, they prevent internalist approaches from falling into descriptive accounts of de facto acceptance of power. These forms of external critique can be compatible with internalist accounts of legitimacy, provided that they do not contrast with what I call methodological and substantive internalism. Accordingly, in the article, I discuss which stances of external critique can and should be accommodated within internalist accounts of legitimacy, without renouncing to the realist character of the approach. (shrink)

Although the discussion about feasibility in political theory is still in its infancy, some important progress has been made in the last years to advance our understanding. In this paper, we intend to make a contribution to this growing literature by investigating the proper place of feasibility considerations in political theory. A motivating force behind this study is a suspicion that many presumptions made about feasibility in several current debates—such as that between practice-independence and practice-dependence, ideal and non-ideal theory, and (...) political moralism and political realism—are too rigid and underestimate the numerous different ways in which feasibility concerns may enter into our theorizing. To chisel out this feasibility space, our aim is to suggest two metatheoretical constraints on normative political principles as intuitively plausible, the so-called ‘fitness constraint’ and the ‘functional constraint’, through which we elucidate five central aspects for determining proper feasibility constraints of an account in political theory. (shrink)