This chapter develops and defends a new account of political legitimacy. I argue that a regime is... more This chapter develops and defends a new account of political legitimacy. I argue that a regime is legitimate insofar as it achieves quality assent to rule. Assent to rule is an evaluative assessment of the regime, by its subjects, about whether the regime realizes some goods through the exercise of power and authority. Assent is quality assent just when it is consistent with what I call the minimal claim of ruling, namely, the provision of basic security for all subjects. When legitimacy is characterized in these terms, its achievement will be naturally correlated with the realization of key political goods: non-alienation, stability, and political alignment among subjects. What makes this account distinctive, and attractive, is that it captures the crucial insights from both sides of the theoretical divide in the existing literature on political legitimacy, namely (i) that legitimacy is a good-making feature of a regime, but also (ii) that legitimacy depends upon people’s subjectiv...
In this paper, I develop and defend a new interpretation of legislation in Plato’s final work, th... more In this paper, I develop and defend a new interpretation of legislation in Plato’s final work, the Laws. There Plato emphasizes the free status of citizens, saying that the appropriate ideal for a political community composed of free individuals is voluntary deference to law. I examine Plato’s claim that in order to legislate in accordance with this free status, the lawgiver ought to attach preambles to laws, often called legal preludes. I criticize two prominent views of the purpose of the preludes: one that argues their aim is to make individual citizens wise through rational persuasion, and one that argues that their aim is to produce compliance through non-rational means. I argue that both of these views have neglected the important connection between the use of preludes and their stated purpose, which is to treat the listener as free. Instead, I defend my own view of their purpose: the preludes promote willing obedience to laws on the basis of their wisdom, though they do not e...
In this paper I defend Max Weber's concept of political legitimacy as a standard for the mora... more In this paper I defend Max Weber's concept of political legitimacy as a standard for the moral evaluation of states. On this view, a state is legitimate when its subjects regard it as having a valid claim to exercise power and authority. Weber’s analysis of legitimacy is often assumed to be merely descriptive, but I argue that Weberian legitimacy has moral significance because it indicates that political stability has been secured on the basis of civic alignment. Stability on this basis enables all the goods of peaceful cooperation with minimal state violence and intimidation, thereby guarding against alienation and tyranny. Furthermore, I argue, since Weberian legitimacy is empirically measurable in terms that avoid controversial value judgments, its adoption would bridge a longstanding divide between philosophers and social scientists
The presumed correlation between data accumulation and power is meant to offer both a diagnosis o... more The presumed correlation between data accumulation and power is meant to offer both a diagnosis of illegitimate digital power, and remedies for it, such as compensating individuals when their data is used. In this paper, we show why the claim “more data, more power” is false, and, therefore, why many proposals for reforming companies like Facebook miss the mark. Both Hobbesian sovereign power and Foucauldian structural power are, we argue, inadequate as models for digital power, because they miss a crucial aspect of it. What we call “EmpPower” works through rules that enable users of digital technology to interact on the basis of simple but versatile assignments of permissions. Accordingly, we argue that digital power demands a new approach to theorizing when power is legitimate. We propose a framework for digital legitimacy that vindicates the intuition that the legitimacy deficits of companies like Facebook arise from their system effects.
:In this essay I defend an alternative account of why markets are legitimate. I argue that market... more :In this essay I defend an alternative account of why markets are legitimate. I argue that markets have a raison d’être—a potential to be valuable that, if fulfilled, would justify their existence. I characterize this potential in terms of the goods that are promoted by the legal protection of economic agency: resource discretion, contribution esteem, wealth, diffusion of power, and freedom of association. I argue that market institutions deliver these goods without requiring the participants to have shared ends, or shared deliberation about joint ends—indeed, this feature is the source of the market’s distinctive contribution to well-being. I suggest that when markets lack legitimacy, this is because they fail to fulfill their raison d’être, or fail to be recognized as doing so. Thus, the contours of legal protection must be drawn so that these goods are realized together in a recognizable way, without sacrificing one good for the sake of others. Finally, I argue that this account is appealing because it allows regulators to consider a plurality of goods, and because it makes room for the essential role of rhetoric in securing market legitimacy.
Political realists seek to provide an alternative to accounts of political legitimacy that are ba... more Political realists seek to provide an alternative to accounts of political legitimacy that are based on moral standards. In this endeavor, they face the challenge of how to interpret the maxim that power cannot be self-legitimating. In this paper we argue that work by Bernard Williams sheds light on the possible answers to this challenge. While Williams aligns himself with the realist tradition, his account of legitimacy contains an implicit critique of political realism. This is evident, we show, in his rejections of the views of Thomas Hobbes and Max Weber. Williams is not satisfied with Hobbes because he conflates legitimacy and political order, eliminating space for criticizing power. Weber’s view, however, offers a non-moralist standard of legitimacy that has critical purchase. This critical purchase emerges from the demands made on rulers to uphold the values that underlie their legitimation, combined with the ethic of responsibility. The resulting grounds for criticism are thus consistent with the maxim that power cannot be self-legitimating – the very maxim that Williams puts at the heart of his realism. By showing that Williams’s partial rejection of Hobbes and Weber cannot be sustained only on realist grounds, our analysis clarifies the limits of political realism.
Consent plays a leading role in many theories of political legitimacy. This paper addresses the t... more Consent plays a leading role in many theories of political legitimacy. This paper addresses the topic of the legitimacy of the state, in the sense of having the appropriate standing to exercise power over its subjects. The paper argues that both the contractualist view (based on hypothetical consent) and the voluntarist view (based on actual consent) involve unacceptable idealizations. The paper then develops and defends the sovereignty conception, according to which a regime is legitimate insofar as it achieves actual quality consent to rule. Quality consent obtains when a subject consents to her state on the basis of a judgment of governance success, provided that the judgment does not conflict with the government’s minimal aim, i.e. basic security for all subjects. The paper argues that a state comes to be legitimate by governing in such a way as to be widely recognized as doing so successfully by its subjects.
This article offers a comprehensive and critical analysis of Eric Heinze's book Hate Speech and D... more This article offers a comprehensive and critical analysis of Eric Heinze's book Hate Speech and Democratic Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2016). Heinze's project is to formulate and defend a more theoretically complex version of the idea (also defended by people like Ronald Dworkin and James Weinstein) that general legal prohibitions on hate speech in public discourse compromises the state's democratic legitimacy. We offer a detailed synopsis of Heinze's view, highlighting some of its distinctive qualities and strengths. We then develop a critical response to this view with three main focal points: (1) the characterisation of democratic legitimacy as something distinct from (and whose demands aren't identical with those of) legitimacy per se; (2) the claim that the requirements of democracy are hypothetical, rather than categorical, imperatives; and relatedly (3) the question of how we should reconcile the requirements of democratic legitimacy with the costs that may follow from prioritising democratic legitimacy. We argue that there are significant difficulties for Heinze's account on all three fronts.
In this paper I defend Max Weber's concept of political legitimacy as a standard for the moral ev... more In this paper I defend Max Weber's concept of political legitimacy as a standard for the moral evaluation of states. On this view, a state is legitimate when its subjects regard it as having a valid claim to exercise power and authority. Weber’s analysis of legitimacy is often assumed to be merely descriptive, but I argue that Weberian legitimacy has moral significance because it indicates that political stability has been secured on the basis of civic alignment. Stability on this basis enables all the goods of peaceful cooperation with minimal state violence and intimidation, thereby guarding against alienation and tyranny. Furthermore, I argue, since Weberian legitimacy is empirically measurable in terms that avoid controversial value judgments, its adoption would bridge a longstanding divide between philosophers and social scientists
In this paper I develop and defend a new account of political legitimacy. I argue that a regime i... more In this paper I develop and defend a new account of political legitimacy. I argue that a regime is legitimate insofar as it achieves quality assent to rule. Assent to rule is an evaluative assessment of the regime, by its subjects, about whether the regime realizes some goods through the exercise of power and authority. Assent is quality assent just when it is consistent with what I call the minimal claim of ruling, namely, the provision of basic security for all subjects. When legitimacy is characterized in these terms, its achievement will be naturally correlated with the realization of key political goods: non-alienation, stability, and political alignment among subjects. What makes this account distinctive, and attractive, is that it captures the crucial insights from both sides of the theoretical divide in the existing literature on political legitimacy, namely (i) that legitimacy is a good-making feature of a regime, but also (ii) that legitimacy depends upon people's subjective attitudes.
Why does democracy matter for political legitimacy? The paper consists of an analysis of recent a... more Why does democracy matter for political legitimacy? The paper consists of an analysis of recent attempts to explain this, in order to draw a higher-order conclusion about what a successful explanation must do. First, I consider theories of democratic legitimacy recently proposed by Thomas Christiano, David Estlund, and Joshua Cohen. I argue that these views exhibit important shortcomings in showing why democracy contributes to legitimacy. Second, I use these shortcomings to illustrate an important conceptual distinction having to do with the instrumental and non-instrumental values that are involved in democracy. In the case of Christiano, I argue that he does not adequately distinguish the two kinds of value. I argue that Estlund distinguishes them to such an extreme that it is hard to know why they are related and how they can be weighed against each other. I argue that Cohen integrates the two kinds of value to such a degree that the important difference between them is dissolved. What is required is an account that combines the two ways democracy can be valuable — instrumentally and non-instrumentally — while preserving their distinct contributions. Finally, I argue that the recognition conception of political legitimacy can provide such a preservative combination, and it therefore represents a new justification for the legitimacy of democracy.
In this paper, I develop and defend a new interpretation of legislation in Plato's final work, th... more In this paper, I develop and defend a new interpretation of legislation in Plato's final work, the Laws. In his outline for a well-governed city, Plato emphasizes the free status of citizens, saying that the appropriate ideal for a political community composed of free individuals is voluntary deference to law. I examine Plato's claim that in order to legislate in accordance with this free status, the lawgiver ought to attach preambles to laws, often called legal preludes. I criticize two prominent views of the purpose of the preludes: one that argues their aim is to make individual citizens wise through rational persuasion, and one that argues that their aim is to produce compliance through non-rational means. I argue that both of these views have neglected the important connection between the use of preludes and their stated purpose, which is to treat the listener as free. Instead, I defend my own view of their purpose: the preludes promote willing obedience to laws on the basis of their wisdom, though they do not effect understanding of the reasons behind the law. When construed this way, the legal preludes evince a concern for the sort of freedom that is available to citizens under the law. The value of this freedom is not reducible to the lawgiver's aim of promoting individual citizens' welfare through intelligent rule, although the value of freedom is conditional on intelligent rule. The interpretation that I defend thus represents a novel theory of how a coercive legal order can aim at both the happiness and the freedom of citizens.
This chapter develops and defends a new account of political legitimacy. I argue that a regime is... more This chapter develops and defends a new account of political legitimacy. I argue that a regime is legitimate insofar as it achieves quality assent to rule. Assent to rule is an evaluative assessment of the regime, by its subjects, about whether the regime realizes some goods through the exercise of power and authority. Assent is quality assent just when it is consistent with what I call the minimal claim of ruling, namely, the provision of basic security for all subjects. When legitimacy is characterized in these terms, its achievement will be naturally correlated with the realization of key political goods: non-alienation, stability, and political alignment among subjects. What makes this account distinctive, and attractive, is that it captures the crucial insights from both sides of the theoretical divide in the existing literature on political legitimacy, namely (i) that legitimacy is a good-making feature of a regime, but also (ii) that legitimacy depends upon people’s subjectiv...
In this paper, I develop and defend a new interpretation of legislation in Plato’s final work, th... more In this paper, I develop and defend a new interpretation of legislation in Plato’s final work, the Laws. There Plato emphasizes the free status of citizens, saying that the appropriate ideal for a political community composed of free individuals is voluntary deference to law. I examine Plato’s claim that in order to legislate in accordance with this free status, the lawgiver ought to attach preambles to laws, often called legal preludes. I criticize two prominent views of the purpose of the preludes: one that argues their aim is to make individual citizens wise through rational persuasion, and one that argues that their aim is to produce compliance through non-rational means. I argue that both of these views have neglected the important connection between the use of preludes and their stated purpose, which is to treat the listener as free. Instead, I defend my own view of their purpose: the preludes promote willing obedience to laws on the basis of their wisdom, though they do not e...
In this paper I defend Max Weber's concept of political legitimacy as a standard for the mora... more In this paper I defend Max Weber's concept of political legitimacy as a standard for the moral evaluation of states. On this view, a state is legitimate when its subjects regard it as having a valid claim to exercise power and authority. Weber’s analysis of legitimacy is often assumed to be merely descriptive, but I argue that Weberian legitimacy has moral significance because it indicates that political stability has been secured on the basis of civic alignment. Stability on this basis enables all the goods of peaceful cooperation with minimal state violence and intimidation, thereby guarding against alienation and tyranny. Furthermore, I argue, since Weberian legitimacy is empirically measurable in terms that avoid controversial value judgments, its adoption would bridge a longstanding divide between philosophers and social scientists
The presumed correlation between data accumulation and power is meant to offer both a diagnosis o... more The presumed correlation between data accumulation and power is meant to offer both a diagnosis of illegitimate digital power, and remedies for it, such as compensating individuals when their data is used. In this paper, we show why the claim “more data, more power” is false, and, therefore, why many proposals for reforming companies like Facebook miss the mark. Both Hobbesian sovereign power and Foucauldian structural power are, we argue, inadequate as models for digital power, because they miss a crucial aspect of it. What we call “EmpPower” works through rules that enable users of digital technology to interact on the basis of simple but versatile assignments of permissions. Accordingly, we argue that digital power demands a new approach to theorizing when power is legitimate. We propose a framework for digital legitimacy that vindicates the intuition that the legitimacy deficits of companies like Facebook arise from their system effects.
:In this essay I defend an alternative account of why markets are legitimate. I argue that market... more :In this essay I defend an alternative account of why markets are legitimate. I argue that markets have a raison d’être—a potential to be valuable that, if fulfilled, would justify their existence. I characterize this potential in terms of the goods that are promoted by the legal protection of economic agency: resource discretion, contribution esteem, wealth, diffusion of power, and freedom of association. I argue that market institutions deliver these goods without requiring the participants to have shared ends, or shared deliberation about joint ends—indeed, this feature is the source of the market’s distinctive contribution to well-being. I suggest that when markets lack legitimacy, this is because they fail to fulfill their raison d’être, or fail to be recognized as doing so. Thus, the contours of legal protection must be drawn so that these goods are realized together in a recognizable way, without sacrificing one good for the sake of others. Finally, I argue that this account is appealing because it allows regulators to consider a plurality of goods, and because it makes room for the essential role of rhetoric in securing market legitimacy.
Political realists seek to provide an alternative to accounts of political legitimacy that are ba... more Political realists seek to provide an alternative to accounts of political legitimacy that are based on moral standards. In this endeavor, they face the challenge of how to interpret the maxim that power cannot be self-legitimating. In this paper we argue that work by Bernard Williams sheds light on the possible answers to this challenge. While Williams aligns himself with the realist tradition, his account of legitimacy contains an implicit critique of political realism. This is evident, we show, in his rejections of the views of Thomas Hobbes and Max Weber. Williams is not satisfied with Hobbes because he conflates legitimacy and political order, eliminating space for criticizing power. Weber’s view, however, offers a non-moralist standard of legitimacy that has critical purchase. This critical purchase emerges from the demands made on rulers to uphold the values that underlie their legitimation, combined with the ethic of responsibility. The resulting grounds for criticism are thus consistent with the maxim that power cannot be self-legitimating – the very maxim that Williams puts at the heart of his realism. By showing that Williams’s partial rejection of Hobbes and Weber cannot be sustained only on realist grounds, our analysis clarifies the limits of political realism.
Consent plays a leading role in many theories of political legitimacy. This paper addresses the t... more Consent plays a leading role in many theories of political legitimacy. This paper addresses the topic of the legitimacy of the state, in the sense of having the appropriate standing to exercise power over its subjects. The paper argues that both the contractualist view (based on hypothetical consent) and the voluntarist view (based on actual consent) involve unacceptable idealizations. The paper then develops and defends the sovereignty conception, according to which a regime is legitimate insofar as it achieves actual quality consent to rule. Quality consent obtains when a subject consents to her state on the basis of a judgment of governance success, provided that the judgment does not conflict with the government’s minimal aim, i.e. basic security for all subjects. The paper argues that a state comes to be legitimate by governing in such a way as to be widely recognized as doing so successfully by its subjects.
This article offers a comprehensive and critical analysis of Eric Heinze's book Hate Speech and D... more This article offers a comprehensive and critical analysis of Eric Heinze's book Hate Speech and Democratic Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2016). Heinze's project is to formulate and defend a more theoretically complex version of the idea (also defended by people like Ronald Dworkin and James Weinstein) that general legal prohibitions on hate speech in public discourse compromises the state's democratic legitimacy. We offer a detailed synopsis of Heinze's view, highlighting some of its distinctive qualities and strengths. We then develop a critical response to this view with three main focal points: (1) the characterisation of democratic legitimacy as something distinct from (and whose demands aren't identical with those of) legitimacy per se; (2) the claim that the requirements of democracy are hypothetical, rather than categorical, imperatives; and relatedly (3) the question of how we should reconcile the requirements of democratic legitimacy with the costs that may follow from prioritising democratic legitimacy. We argue that there are significant difficulties for Heinze's account on all three fronts.
In this paper I defend Max Weber's concept of political legitimacy as a standard for the moral ev... more In this paper I defend Max Weber's concept of political legitimacy as a standard for the moral evaluation of states. On this view, a state is legitimate when its subjects regard it as having a valid claim to exercise power and authority. Weber’s analysis of legitimacy is often assumed to be merely descriptive, but I argue that Weberian legitimacy has moral significance because it indicates that political stability has been secured on the basis of civic alignment. Stability on this basis enables all the goods of peaceful cooperation with minimal state violence and intimidation, thereby guarding against alienation and tyranny. Furthermore, I argue, since Weberian legitimacy is empirically measurable in terms that avoid controversial value judgments, its adoption would bridge a longstanding divide between philosophers and social scientists
In this paper I develop and defend a new account of political legitimacy. I argue that a regime i... more In this paper I develop and defend a new account of political legitimacy. I argue that a regime is legitimate insofar as it achieves quality assent to rule. Assent to rule is an evaluative assessment of the regime, by its subjects, about whether the regime realizes some goods through the exercise of power and authority. Assent is quality assent just when it is consistent with what I call the minimal claim of ruling, namely, the provision of basic security for all subjects. When legitimacy is characterized in these terms, its achievement will be naturally correlated with the realization of key political goods: non-alienation, stability, and political alignment among subjects. What makes this account distinctive, and attractive, is that it captures the crucial insights from both sides of the theoretical divide in the existing literature on political legitimacy, namely (i) that legitimacy is a good-making feature of a regime, but also (ii) that legitimacy depends upon people's subjective attitudes.
Why does democracy matter for political legitimacy? The paper consists of an analysis of recent a... more Why does democracy matter for political legitimacy? The paper consists of an analysis of recent attempts to explain this, in order to draw a higher-order conclusion about what a successful explanation must do. First, I consider theories of democratic legitimacy recently proposed by Thomas Christiano, David Estlund, and Joshua Cohen. I argue that these views exhibit important shortcomings in showing why democracy contributes to legitimacy. Second, I use these shortcomings to illustrate an important conceptual distinction having to do with the instrumental and non-instrumental values that are involved in democracy. In the case of Christiano, I argue that he does not adequately distinguish the two kinds of value. I argue that Estlund distinguishes them to such an extreme that it is hard to know why they are related and how they can be weighed against each other. I argue that Cohen integrates the two kinds of value to such a degree that the important difference between them is dissolved. What is required is an account that combines the two ways democracy can be valuable — instrumentally and non-instrumentally — while preserving their distinct contributions. Finally, I argue that the recognition conception of political legitimacy can provide such a preservative combination, and it therefore represents a new justification for the legitimacy of democracy.
In this paper, I develop and defend a new interpretation of legislation in Plato's final work, th... more In this paper, I develop and defend a new interpretation of legislation in Plato's final work, the Laws. In his outline for a well-governed city, Plato emphasizes the free status of citizens, saying that the appropriate ideal for a political community composed of free individuals is voluntary deference to law. I examine Plato's claim that in order to legislate in accordance with this free status, the lawgiver ought to attach preambles to laws, often called legal preludes. I criticize two prominent views of the purpose of the preludes: one that argues their aim is to make individual citizens wise through rational persuasion, and one that argues that their aim is to produce compliance through non-rational means. I argue that both of these views have neglected the important connection between the use of preludes and their stated purpose, which is to treat the listener as free. Instead, I defend my own view of their purpose: the preludes promote willing obedience to laws on the basis of their wisdom, though they do not effect understanding of the reasons behind the law. When construed this way, the legal preludes evince a concern for the sort of freedom that is available to citizens under the law. The value of this freedom is not reducible to the lawgiver's aim of promoting individual citizens' welfare through intelligent rule, although the value of freedom is conditional on intelligent rule. The interpretation that I defend thus represents a novel theory of how a coercive legal order can aim at both the happiness and the freedom of citizens.
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