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Outline of a Theory of Legitimacy as Critical Responsiveness

Political Theory
International
Normative Theory
State Power
Enzo Rossi
University of Amsterdam
Enzo Rossi
University of Amsterdam

Abstract

In this paper I sketch a new account of legitimacy, and show how it may help illuminating some controversies on the differences and similarities between state-level and supra- and trans-national legitimacy issues. I start out by discussing the longstanding rift between empirical and normative approaches to legitimacy. I show that legitimacy is uniquely anomalous among comparably central concepts, for it can be used in a value-neutral way in social science, whereas it is intrinsically evaluative in political philosophy. This anomaly yields a conceptual fork. On the one hand, one could stipulate that empirical and normative uses of legitimacy are best disambiguated as referring to two different concepts (authority and legitimacy, respectively). But that is a costly move in terms of the rift from common usage a well as the prospects of fruitful engagement across disciplines (that is especially true for realist political theory, which prides itself on being empirically informed). So I opt to for the other branch of the fork, which points toward a normative account of legitimacy that--unlike most accounts in the philosophical literature--is not indifferent to sociological facts such as actual belief in legitimacy and the near-universal phenomenon of political coercion. I dub such a realist account 'legitimacy as critical responsiveness'--a new metric of legitimacy based on a coercive regime’s ability to reflect its stakeholders’ relevant values, which however are to be vetted for ideological distortions. I illustrate the potential of this approach with the case of transnational power structures (e.g. WTO, IMF, World Bank, and the like). While traditional normative approaches to legitimacy have little to say about non-state actors without legal structures backed by coercive force, critical responsiveness allows us to evaluate power structures not on the basis of their coercive rules and actions, but on the basis of their normative commitments. In this way fluid transnational power structures become just as legible for a theory of legitimacy as the familiar institutions and actions of states.