Political legitimacy and the pragmatic turn

Abstract

This study develops a new philosophical approach to the concept of political legitimacy. It aims to account for the meaning of legitimacy-claims in terms of their use in political practice. Explicating the meaning of political legitimacy in terms of practice casts the task of political judgment—assessing in practice whether a particular authority is legitimate or not—in a different light than established philosophical approaches do: it stresses the constitutive role and contested character of political identity, representations of authority, and the uptake and narration of events. This has implications for the way philosophers theorize about political legitimacy: it challenges the idea of a general philosophical theory that provides moral principles or criteria to be applied in practice, and shifts attention instead toward the task of explicating the modes of involvement in practice that political judgment requires. Taking as a starting point the political experience of subjects confronted by power, and drawing on the philosophy of language developed by Robert Brandom, this ‘social-pragmatic’ approach to political legitimacy aims to provide an account of what it is we do when we take an authority to be legitimate or illegitimate. By starting not with an account of what it is for political authority to be legitimate, but by asking what we do when we take it to be so—that is, by taking a ‘pragmatic turn’—this study shifts the direction of questioning compared to established approaches to political legitimacy. On the approach developed here, to take political authority to be legitimate or illegitimate is to take a particular kind of practical stance toward it: to recognize its rule as normative, that is, to attribute to it an entitlement to rule and to undertake a commitment to treat it as a source of reasons. Conversely, to take political authority to be illegitimate is to withhold the attribution of an entitlement to rule. To say that political authority is legitimate or illegitimate is to make such a stance explicit. This social-pragmatic way of understanding political legitimacy has the consequence of situating political judgment—the task of assessing in practice whether political authority is legitimate (de jure) or merely purports to be so (de facto)—in the midst of an ongoing practical engagement. To be a political subject is to be involved in a practice that both enables and unsettles political judgment, exposing one to vulnerability, fallibility, and uncertainty as inherent features of political life. Political judgment appears not as a problem that can be resolved in theory by justifying the right set of principles and criteria, but as a predicament inherent in having a first-person perspective in relation to political authority; as a practical political task, rather than a philosophical problem.