Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-fqc5m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T23:42:26.067Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

112 - Legitimacy

from L

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2015

Jon Mandle
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Albany
David A. Reidy
Affiliation:
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Get access

Summary

Political legitimacy does not figure in Rawls’s early work, notably in A Theory of Justice. In Theory he does make use of the broader idea of “legitimate expectations” that citizens come to have when they participate in a social practice, but his main concern is to specify the principles of justice to which the basic structure of society, including the structure of political authority, must conform. Not surprisingly, legitimacy is a major theme of his later work, in which he develops his account of political liberalism. Legitimacy figures in two principal ways: one is the idea of “legitimate law,” and the other is the “principle of legitimacy,” or what he sometimes calls the “liberal (or democratic) principle of legitimacy.” Both of these uses are related to the conventional notion of a legitimate authority as having the right to exercise political power to make a law or decide policy, with those subject to that authority having at least a presumptive obligation to obey. For Rawls, legitimate law results from a properly constituted political process, and “is politically (morally) binding on [one] as a citizen and is to be accepted as such” (CP 578). Such a properly constituted process must accord with the principle of legitimacy.

The principle of legitimacy arises directly from the defining problem of political liberalism, which is to explain how a society can be well-ordered by a conception of justice when its citizens adhere to conflicting comprehensive doctrines, each of which may give rise to its own conception of justice. Political liberalism solves that problem by proposing a political conception of justice that all reasonable citizens may accept because it is not based upon the concepts or principles of any particular comprehensive doctrine.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Legitimacy
  • Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • Book: The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon
  • Online publication: 05 February 2015
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139026741.113
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Legitimacy
  • Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • Book: The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon
  • Online publication: 05 February 2015
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139026741.113
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Legitimacy
  • Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • Book: The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon
  • Online publication: 05 February 2015
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139026741.113
Available formats
×