Consent and Political Legitimacy
Consent and Political Legitimacy
This chapter addresses the topic of the legitimacy of the state, in the sense of having the appropriate standing to exercise power over its subjects. The chapter argues that both the contractualist view (based on hypothetical consent) and the voluntarist view (based on actual consent) involve unacceptable idealizations. The chapter 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 chapter 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.
Keywords: legitimacy, contractualism, voluntarism, consent, sovereignty
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
