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Political protest is often at least partially about the question of legitimacy. How can we distinguish whether a regime is legitimate, or merely purports to be so? In
Facing Authority, Thomas Fossen develops a new philosophical approach to political legitimacy, interweaving analyses of key concepts (including representation, identity, and temporality) with examples of real-life struggles for legitimacy, from the German Autumn to the Arab Spring. Instead of asking "what makes authorities legitimate?" in the abstract, Fossen investigates how the question of legitimacy manifests itself in practice. The result is a pragmatist alternative to predominant moralist and realist approaches to legitimacy in political philosophy.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part One: The Question of Legitimacy
- 1. Beyond Codification
- 2. Rethinking Legitimacy
- 3. Rethinking Judgment
- Part Two: Judgment in the Face of Authority
- 4. Portraying Power
- 5. Legitimacy as an Existential Predicament
- 6. Judgment as Timecraft
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Thomas Fossen is Assistant Professor of Political Philosophy at Leiden University, the Netherlands. His research is in political philosophy (or political theory), at the intersection with political science and philosophy of language. His work addresses questions of political legitimacy, political obligation, and political representation. Fossen was previously a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, KU Leuven, and the University of Essex. In 2015, he received a Veni grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). In 2020-2021, he was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a Humboldt Fellow at Goethe University Frankfurt.
Summary
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
Political protest is often at least partially about the question of legitimacy. How can we distinguish whether a regime is legitimate, or merely purports to be so?
In Facing Authority, Thomas Fossen develops a new philosophical approach to political legitimacy, interweaving analyses of key concepts (including representation, identity, and temporality) with examples of real-life struggles for legitimacy, from the German Autumn to the Arab Spring. Instead of asking "what makes authorities legitimate?" in the abstract, Fossen investigates how the question of legitimacy manifests itself in practice.
Facing Authority proposes that judging legitimacy is not simply a matter of applying moral principles, but of engaging in various forms of political contestation: over the representation of power (what is the nature of the regime?), collective selfhood (who am I, and who are we?), and the meaning of events (what happened here--a coup, or a revolution?). Fossen argues that these questions constitute the heart of the question of legitimacy, but thus far have been neglected by theorists of legitimacy. Compelling and original, Facing Authority is a pragmatist alternative to predominant moralist and realist approaches to legitimacy in political philosophy.
Additional text
Facing Authority fills a sizeable gap in the literature on political legitimacy by providing an intriguing analysis of what we are doing when we ask whether a regime is legitimate. The result is a meta-normative theory of political legitimacy, which offers a pragmatist take on the meaning of 'legitimacy', the nature of inquiry into a regime's legitimacy and the virtues that conduce to doing it well, and the ontology of political persons, communities, and events ... By contesting the meta-normative presuppositions of much contemporary writing on political legitimacy, Facing Authority jumpstarts a long overdue debate in contemporary political theory.
