Political Legitimacy and Collective Political Agency

Abstract

Legitimacy is a key virtue of political institutions. Political institutions, in turn, can often be regarded as collective or group agents. For instance, the state, an institution we are all familiar with, is often treated as an agent in its own right (signing treaties, taking domestic and foreign policy decisions etc.), and so are some international institutions, such as the WTO, the IMF, or the ICC. But what do political legitimacy and collective agency have to do with one another? There is an important tradition in political theory -- which might be referred to as the Kantian-Rousseauian tradition -- that appears to establish a strong connection between the two. From this perspective, a genuinely collective state-agent must also be a legitimate one. It must be a set of institutions so organized as to speak in the name of all, governed by a ‘general’ or ‘omnilateral’ will. Taking the lead from this tradition, this panel seeks to explore the relationship between collective agency on the one hand, and political legitimacy on the other. It will address questions such as the following: • What conditions must a set of people (or institutions) fulfill in order to count as a group/collective agent? • What conditions must a set of institutions fulfill in order to count as politically legitimate? • Is there an overlap between group-agency conditions and political-legitimacy conditions? • May an illegitimate political arrangement count as a group agent or vice-versa? • What is it for a state to ‘speak in the name of all’/’be governed by an omnilateral will’? Which procedural and substantive guarantees should a state exhibit to satisfy this desideratum? • How do considerations of legitimacy (both substantive and procedural) impact on the allocation of responsibility to members of group agents for what the collective does?

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