Facing Authority (eBook)

A Theory of Political Legitimacy

Thomas Fossen (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023
Oxford University Press (Verlag)
978-0-19-764572-7 (ISBN)

Infos

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Political protest is often at least partially about the question of legitimacy. How can we distinguish whether a regime is legitimate, or merely purports to be so? In Facing Authority, Thomas Fossen develops a new philosophical approach to political legitimacy, interweaving analyses of key concepts (including representation, identity, and temporality) with examples of real-life struggles for legitimacy, from the German Autumn to the Arab Spring. Instead of asking "e;what makes authorities legitimate?"e; in the abstract, Fossen investigates how the question of legitimacy manifests itself in practice. Facing Authority proposes that judging legitimacy is not simply a matter of applying moral principles, but of engaging in various forms of political contestation: over the representation of power (what is the nature of the regime?), collective selfhood (who am I, and who are we?), and the meaning of events (what happened here--a coup, or a revolution?). Fossen argues that these questions constitute the heart of the question of legitimacy, but thus far have been neglected by theorists of legitimacy. Compelling and original, Facing Authority is a pragmatist alternative to predominant moralist and realist approaches to legitimacy in political philosophy.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 10.10.2023
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Theorie
• ISBN-10: 0-19-764572-0 / 0197645720
• ISBN-13: 978-0-19-764572-7 / 9780197645727