Liberal Legitimacy for the Real World

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to contribute to the development of an account of the requirements for political legitimacy that can guide our assessments of both nascent and established states. To accomplish this, I challenge three common assumptions that I believe make it difficult to arrive at plausible and consistent judgments about the moral standing of states: (1) the assumption that the legitimacy of the state depends solely on its functional capacities – particularly its ability to secure individual rights and public goods, (2) the assumption that the same requirements for legitimacy must apply in all cases, and (3) the assumption that a state must either be fully legitimate or fully illegitimate. Against the first assumption, I argue that functionalist accounts of legitimacy that focus exclusively on individual rights protection cannot account for our intuitions about unilateral annexation. We should therefore jettison these accounts in favor of alternatives that recognize the value of political autonomy and our associated claim to collective self-determination. Against the second assumption, I contend that, in order to reach plausible judgments about the governance of divided societies, we ought to recognize that requirements for legitimacy that normally apply may be conditionally waived in contexts where they are infeasible to meet. Finally, against the third assumption, I defend the view that states can be ‘partially legitimate’ if they meet the requirements for legitimacy vis-à-vis most, but not all, of their subjects. To do this, I outline a novel case for this view and address the objection that states cannot coherently operate in a condition of partial legitimacy. By developing a liberal approach to thinking about legitimacy that does away with these assumptions, my dissertation establishes that political philosophers should focus less on the generic challenges of political rule, and more on the ways in which contingent social and political conditions bear on our judgments about the moral standing of particular states.