The Grounds of Political Legitimacy Fabienne Peter Full Chapter

The Grounds of Political Legitimacy
Fabienne Peter
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-grounds-of-political-legitimacy-fabienne-peter/
The Grounds of Political Legitimacy
The Grounds of
Political Legitimacy
FA B I E N N E P E T E R
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Fabienne Peter 2023
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023930841
ISBN 978–0–19–887238–2
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198872382.001.0001
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Contents
Preface vii
I . P O L I T IC A L L E G I T I M AC Y A N D I T S G R O U N D S
1. Political Legitimacy 3
1.1 What Makes Political Decisions Legitimate? 3
1.2 The Normative Concern with Political Legitimacy 9
1.3 The Meta-normative Perspective 15
2. The Political Will 23
2.1 Will-Based Conceptions of Political Legitimacy 23
2.2 Equal Political Authoritativeness 31
2.3 The Arbitrariness Objection 39
3. Political Factualism 45
3.1 Fact-Based Conceptions of Political Legitimacy 46
3.2 Making the Right Decisions 50
3.3 The Accessibility Objection 54
4. Political Cognitivism 63
4.1 Belief-Based Conceptions of Political Legitimacy 63
4.2 Cognitive Political Authority 71
4.3 The Epistemic Underdetermination Objection 82
5. A Hybrid Account of the Grounds of Legitimacy 91
5.1 Going Hybrid 91
5.2 Epistemic Constraints on the Political Will 102
5.3 Responding to Epistemic Underdetermination 109
I I . A N E P I ST E M IC T H E O RY O F
P O L I T IC A L J U ST I F IC AT IO N
6. Political Deliberation 121
6.1 Justificationism about Political Legitimacy 121
6.2 Political Justification and Political Deliberation 128
6.3 Well-Ordered Political Deliberation 135
vi Contents
7. Epistemic Norms of Political Deliberation 143

7.1 Epistemic Accountability in Political Deliberation 143
7.2 The Justified Belief Norm 149
7.3 Procedural Epistemic Norms 158
8. Political Deference 166
8.1 What Is Political Deference? 166
8.2 When Is Political Deference Required? 173
8.3 The Limits of Political Deference 181
9. Responding to Political Disagreements 190
9.1 Political Disagreements 190
9.2 Political Disagreements and Political Justification 196
9.3 Why Democracy? 203
Epilogue 211
Bibliography 215
Index 225
Preface
I first started working on political legitimacy in the context of my doctoral

dissertation more than 30 years ago. I’ve been tempted to close this line of
research many times, but political events kept reminding me that political
legitimacy is one of the most important normative concepts that we have.
Political challenges such as climate change or the recent Covid-19 pandemic
require an adequate response that respects the constraints of political legitim
acy. But what are those constraints? My thoughts on this issue have shifted
over the last decade or so. I used to think that democracy was the only pos
sible source of legitimacy. But I don’t think that anymore.
I still believe that there is a deep connection between inclusive political
deliberation, of the sort supported by a democratic political culture, and
political legitimacy. Any erosion of a democratic political culture would be a
step in the wrong direction. But the track-record of democracies in meeting
important political challenges is dubious. Think of climate change, or of deep-
seated and still widening social and economic inequalities. Of course, some of
the political problems we are facing today are the result of corrupted democ-
racies, not the fault of democracy itself. But as the Covid-19 pandemic has
also made vivid, there is potentially a lot at stake in political decision-making.
Wrong political decisions can put us all at risk. I now think that a failure to
take measures necessary to protect the population from potentially cata-
strophic outcomes is a distinct source of illegitimacy. Democratic decision-
making might not offer sufficient safeguards in this regard. Political office
holders and citizens can and should be held accountable to a higher standard.
In this book I explain what this might entail.
I’m deeply indebted to a great number of people for helping me develop my
thoughts on the topics of this book. I’ve particularly benefited from conversa-
tions with Dave Estlund, the late Jerry Gaus (alas!), Klemens Kappel, Michael
Hannon, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, and Kai Spiekermann. Others I wish to
thank include Elizabeth Anderson, Adam Arnold, Natalie Ashton, Elvio
Baccarini, Sameer Bajaj, Thomas Baldwin, Aurélia Bardon, Christian Barry,
Duncan Bell, Chris Bertram, Luc Bovens, Matthias Brinkmann, Bruce Brower,
Ian Carter, Quassim Cassam, Robin Celikates, Ivan Cerovac, Emanuela Ceva,
Bruce Chapman, David Christensen, Tom Christiano, Matthew Clayton,
viii Preface
Tony Coady, Rowan Cruft, Kevin Dorst, Antony Duff, John Dunn, Elizabeth
Edenberg, David Enoch, Cécile Fabre, Julian Fink, James Fleming, Rainer
Forst, Sandy Goldberg, Alvin Goldman, Bob Goodin, Stefan Gosepath,
Amanda Greene, Alex Guerrero, Dan Halliday, Antony Hatzistavrou, Jonathan
Heawood, Ulrike Heuer, Duncan Ivison, Jack Knight, Chandran Kukathas,
Cécile Laborde, Jennifer Lackey, Dimitri Landa, Charles Larmore, Christian
List, Steve Macedo, Matt Matravers, Katrin Meier, David Miller, Liam
Murphy, David O’Brien, Philip Pettit, Ryan Pevnick, Snježana Prijić Samaržija,
Jonathan Quong, Joseph Raz, Massimo Renzo, Patricia Rich, Henry Richardson,
Regina Rini, Oliver Roy, Kristen Rundle, Debra Satz, Ben Saunders, Hans
Bernhard Schmid, Melissa Schwartzberg, Rob Simpson, Zofia Stemplowska,
Tom Stoneham, Victor Tadros, Bob Talisse, Anthony Taylor, Patrick Tomlin,
Yann-Allard Tremblay, Alex Worsnip, Han van Wietmarschen, Chad van
Schoelandt, Kevin Vallier, Andrew Valls, David Velleman, Daniel Viehoff,
Alex Voorhoeve, Steve Wall, Kit Wellman, Leif Wenar, Catherine Wilson, Jo
Wolff, and Gabriel Wollner.
Many more people have given me helpful feedback at conferences, workshops,
and research seminars, and I’m so grateful to organisers and participants.
Events included the following: panel on the epistemic responsibilities of
citizens, APA Eastern Division annual conference, Baltimore; Democratic
Reasons workshop, University of Warwick; online workshop on Should We
Listen to Those Who Deny Science?; Legitimate Decision-Making in Times of
Crisis workshop, The Hoffberger Center for Professional Ethics, University
of Baltimore; Epistemic Circumstances of Democracy conference, University of
Rijeka; Justitia Amplificata annual conference, Frankfurt; Normative Theory
Group workshop, University of Hamburg; Political Epistemology workshop,
Georgetown University; Legitimacy and Stability in Fractious Times work-
shop, University of Leeds; Association for Social and Political Philosophy
annual conference, LUISS Guido Carli/Sapienza, University of Rome; Political
Epistemology conference, Institute of Philosophy, London; PPE conference in
honour of Luc Bovens, LSE; Deep Disagreements conference, Humboldt
University Berlin; Democracy, Legitimacy, and Hate Speech conference, Queen
Mary University; Law and Normativity workshop, Queen Mary University,
Law School; Nomos conference on political legitimacy, APA Central Division
annual conference, Kansas City; Legitimacy and the State conference, Julius
Stone Institute of Jurisprudence, University of Sydney; workshop on Justice
and Risk, Nuffield College Oxford; conference on Contractarianism, Inter
University Centre Dubrovnik; workshop on Religion and Public Justification,
University College London; Epistemic Value of Group Deliberation conference,
Preface ix
Northwestern University; New Directions in Public Reason conference,

University of Birmingham; Value of Democratic Procedures workshop,
University of Pavia; workshop on Factual Disagreements and Political
Legitimacy, University of Copenhagen; Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy
conference, Tucson; Society for Applied Philosophy annual conference,
University of Zurich; conference on Why Not Epistocracy? University of Oslo;
workshop on Steven Darwall’s work, University of Vienna; Democracy con-
ference, University of Belgrade; Walking With Rousseau: Group Attitudes
between Aggregation and Association workshop, University of Geneva;
Democracy workshop, University of Basel; conference on Social Epistemology
and Epistemic Responsibility, King’s College London; Experts and Deliberative
Democracy workshop, University of Hull; conference on “John Rawls’
‘Political Liberalism’ ”, University of Bochum; symposium on Gaus’ The Order
of Public Reason, LSE; Democracy and Rights workshop, University of
Stirling; Epistemic Life of Groups workshop, London; Authority, Legitimacy,
and Legality conference, University of Vienna; the Association of Social and
Legal Philosophy annual conference, University of Warwick; Authority,
Legality, and Legitimacy conference, Distortions of Normativity Project,
Vienna; workshop on the Epistemic Life of Groups, Institute of Philosophy,
London. I’ve also received many helpful suggestions at research seminars at
ANU, University of Cambridge, East Anglia, EHESS in Paris, Hull, Leiden,
Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse, Melbourne,
NUI Galway, NYU, University of Oxford, University of Rijeka, University of
Stirling, Tulane University, University of York, and at the New Directions in
Political Epistemology seminar series at the Institute of Philosophy in London.
Over the course of working on the themes of this book, I was invited to
give talks at several graduate conferences, and the discussions there were
among my favourites. I thank audiences at the Knowledge and Power:
Epistemic Conflicts in Democracy conference, University of Essex; the
St Andrews CEPPA graduate conference in April 2021; the 1st Geneva graduate
conference in political theory; the PPE graduate conference in Witten-Herdecke
in May 2016; the 13th Pavia Graduate Conference in Political Philosophy; and
the 5th International Graduate Conference at the CEU in Budapest. I also
benefited immensely from two events at the University of Rijeka: a summer
school in 2016 and a symposium in 2013 dedicated to my work on demo-
cratic legitimacy.
In July 2021 I gave the Wittgenstein Lectures at the University of Bayreuth,
and that was a first test run for the full manuscript. It was a very intellectually
stimulating week! I’m very grateful to Gabriel Wollner and everyone else
x Preface
involved in organising the event. I received many excellent questions and

comments from students and faculty that helped me improve the presenta-
tion of my argument. Two anonymous reviewers at OUP provided extremely
thoughtful and helpful feedback on each chapter, and I think the book
improved a lot thanks to their comments. I’m also very grateful to Michele
Giavazzi for his insightful comments and his help with preparing the final
version of the manuscript.
I started the research programme that led to this book when I held a
Leverhulme research fellowship on The Normativity of Political Legitimacy in
2010/11. I’m very grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for this fellowship. I also
greatly benefited from a one-month stay at the ANU in 2016, following an
invitation from Geoff Brennan and generously supported by their PPE pro-
gramme. I had many enjoyable conversations with Geoff on the topics of this
book during that time, and was very saddened by his recent death. From 2019
to 2022, I was involved in a collaborative AHRC-funded project on Norms for
the New Public Sphere. I very much enjoyed the regular research meetings
I had with Rowan Cruft, Jonathan Heawood, and Natalie Ashton, which
touched on many aspects of this book. In 2021/22, I had the good fortune of
spending a year at Tulane University, on a Murphy Fellowship at the Center
for Ethics and Public Affairs. I had a wonderful time in New Orleans, also
thanks to many conversations with Michael Hannon and David O’Brien, and
the fellowship allowed me to complete the work on this book (and start a new
research project in moral philosophy).
The book incorporates material from previously published papers, and
I thank the publishers for giving me permission to use this material.
“Epistemic Norms of Political Deliberation.” In Michael Hannon and

Jeroen de Ridder (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology.
New York: Routledge, 2021, pp. 395–406.
“The Grounds of Political Legitimacy.” Journal of the American Philosophical
Association 6(3): 372–90, 2020.
The book also draws on ideas from the following publications and I’m grate-
ful to the publishers for allowing me to do so:
“Truth and Uncertainty in Political Justification.” In Elizabeth Edenberg

and Michael Hannon (eds.), Political Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2021, pp. 64–75.
Preface xi
“Political Legitimacy under Epistemic Constraints: Why Public Reasons

Matter.” In Jack Knight and Melissa Schwartzberg (eds.), Political
Legitimacy (Nomos volume). New York: NYU Press, pp. 147–73, 2019.
“Legitimate Political Authority and Expertise.” In Wojciech Sadurski,
Michael Sevel, and Kevin Walton (eds.), Legitimacy: The State and
Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 32–42, 2019.
“Political Legitimacy.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017
Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
sum2017/entries/legitimacy/.
“The Epistemic Circumstances of Democracy.” In Miranda Fricker and
Michael Brady (eds.), The Epistemic Life of Groups. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016, pp. 133–49.
I’m very grateful for detailed comments I’ve received on all those papers, espe-
cially from Michael Brady, Jeroen de Ridder, Elizabeth Edenberg, Miranda
Fricker, Michael Hannon, Jennifer Rubenstein, Melissa Schwartzberg, Micah
Schwartzman, Kevin Walton, and from anonymous referees.
My final set of thanks has less to do with the content of this book. First of all,
I want to express my deep gratitude to my partner Nigel for his warm support
and great sense of humour. Thanks also for helping me stay grounded! And I
want to thank Heike Roesel for allowing me to use her wonderful print “Loop
II” on the cover of this book. Finally, I want to thank the OUP team for all
their help in producing this book.
PART I
P OL IT IC A L L EG IT I M ACY
A N D IT S GROU NDS
1
Political Legitimacy
Political decisions have the potential to greatly impact our lives. Think of
decisions in relation to abortion or climate change, for example. This makes
political legitimacy an important normative concern. As I understand it, it is
a concern with the permission to make binding political decisions. We expect
political office holders to uphold the constraints of political legitimacy. Abuses
of political power are illegitimate. We also expect citizens to honour political
decisions that are legitimate. But what grounds these normative expectations
towards political office holders and citizens? In other words, what makes
political decisions legitimate? Are they legitimate in virtue of having support
from the citizens? This is what democratic conceptions of political legitimacy
maintain. And they are right to highlight that legitimate political decision-
making must respect well-founded disagreements among the citizens. But
what if democratic decisions fail to track what there is most reason to do? For
example, what if a democratically elected government fails to take measures
necessary to protect its population from threats related to climate change?
Shouldn’t that be recognized as a source of illegitimacy? The question of what
makes political decisions legitimate is not new. But revisiting it is timely in
light of increasing pressures on democracy and the high-stakes political prob-
lems that governments are facing.
1.1 What Makes Political Decisions Legitimate?
There are two approaches we can take to studying political legitimacy as I’ve
defined it. A normative approach investigates the normative conditions under
which there is a permission to make a binding political decision. That
approach focuses on the relationship between political legitimacy and other
normative concerns, for example a concern with justice, or with respect for
the citizens’ autonomy. A second approach, which is often overlooked, is
meta-normative. That approach focuses on the grounds of political legitimacy.
The grounds of political legitimacy are the sources of its normativity.
The Grounds of Political Legitimacy. Fabienne Peter, Oxford University Press. © Fabienne Peter 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198872382.003.0001
4 The Grounds of Political Legitimacy
In this section, I first introduce how I think about our key question: what
makes political decisions legitimate? I then explain why legitimacy is an
important normative concern. In the final section of this chapter, I discuss the
differences between a normative and a meta-normative perspective on polit
ical legitimacy.
(a) The Political Will
Many think that political legitimacy depends on some form of democratic

political control. We can witness the force of this idea in the regularly occur-
ring calls for more democracy—in the Hong Kong protests of 2019, for
example, but also in regional resistance to overly centralized forms of govern-
ment. On this widely held view, political decisions are legitimate in virtue of
having been made democratically in one form or another.
The appeal to democracy is just one example of a very robust and long-
standing tradition of political thought that takes the will of the people as the
ground of political legitimacy. The idea that the political will is the ground of
political legitimacy is prominently articulated in social contract theories (e.g.
Hobbes 2017 [1651]). But we also find it in contemporary forms of liberalism
(e.g. Rawls 1993) as well as in republicanism (e.g. Pettit 2012). The broader
claim, to which democratic theories of political legitimacy tend to be com-
mitted, is that political decisions are legitimate in virtue of how they respond
to the political will.
With the surge of populism that we are witnessing early in the 21st century,
appeals to the political will have become even more prominent, but also more
dubious. While populists appeal to the political will, this appeal isn’t necessar-
ily democratic. Populists themselves tend to pitch the will of the people in
opposition to decisions made by democratically elected representatives. It is
often claimed that the political elite is out of touch and that there is a will of
the people that is in opposition with the decisions made by parliament (e.g.
Mudde and Kaltwasser 2012; Muller 2017). Critics of populism tend to attack
this attempt to circumvent democracy in the name of the political will (e.g.
Weale 2018).
Faith in democracy, and in the political will as the ground of legitimacy, is
also being undermined in a different way. 2016, in particular, is the year in
which many lost confidence in democracy, first with the Brexit decision in
June 2016 and then with the election of Trump in November of that year. Of
course, there have been controversial democratic decisions before 2016
Political Legitimacy 5
(think of the Swiss minaret building ban, to use just one of many examples).
And the rapidly rising economic and social inequalities in many long-
established democracies, the slow response to the climate crisis, and many
similar examples have also shed doubt on the ability of democracies to tackle
urgent political problems. The question many have asked in response to such
cases is, how can the political will be a ground of political legitimacy if it is
uninformed or easily misled, and if democratic procedures have a tendency
to uphold the wrong decisions (e.g. Brennan 2016)?
To be clear, that some people disagree with a democratic decision is not, in
itself, a reason to start doubting democracy. That’s just a feature of democracy,
and it is inevitable if democracy is a tool for making political decisions in the
face of political disagreements (Waldron 1999). And that some democratic
decisions turn out to be mistakes need not be enough to lose confidence in
democracy either. Mistakes do not pose a problem for political legitimacy if
we can trust democracy to make fewer such mistakes or to realize values that
offset the costs of any mistakes.
Democracy is in trouble, however, if relying on the political will stands in
the way of making legitimate decisions. And that is the case in circumstances
in which the problem doesn’t just arise from a deformation of the political
will—say because of a corruption of democratic decision-making procedures.
Democracy is in trouble in circumstances in which the political will is itself a
source of illegitimacy. Consider decision-making in response to the climate
crisis, as an example. Could it be that citizens can’t always be trusted to cor-
rectly assess the threat that climate change poses, and to make the right deci-
sions for future generations? Current circumstances force us to consider this
as a possibility. In light of these pressures on the political will as a ground of
legitimacy, it is thus timely to consider alternatives.
(b) Cognitive Political Authority
The main alternative to the view that the political will is the ground of polit
ical legitimacy is the view that decision-making power should be placed in
the hands of those with an ability to track the right decisions. Call this ability
cognitive political authority, or cognitive authority, for short.
The idea that legitimate political decisions are those made by someone, or a
body of people, with cognitive authority used to be quite common before the
Enlightenment. We find it articulated in Plato’s Republic, which criticizes
the arbitrariness of democracy and argues in favour of the philosophers’
rule—rule by those who have cultivated expertise in identifying the right

decisions and who are not side-tracked by their own interests. As Plato writes
(473d–e):
there will be no end to the troubles of states, or . . . of humanity itself, till

philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and
rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and phil
osophy thus come into the same hands.1
The idea that the ground of political legitimacy is cognitive political authority,
and not the political will, can also be traced to the Bible. Chapter 13 of the
Epistle to the Romans is an origin of the divine right of king theory of polit
ical legitimacy. While some versions of this theory grant absolute political
power to monarchs, Luther’s influential interpretation of this passage suggests
that secular rulers are uniquely authorized to rule in virtue of their superior
grasp of God’s will, and to the extent that they do have this superior grasp.2
The Enlightenment has put pressure on the belief that there is a natural
political hierarchy grounded on epistemic privilege. Who has cognitive polit
ical authority? Who is best able to judge, which political decision should be
made? If the ability to make political judgments is a product of our faculty of
rationality, a faculty that (adult) citizens have in roughly equal measure, isn’t a
legitimate political decision one that responds to the citizens’ will?
Despite these challenges, the idea that political decisions are legitimate in
virtue of being based on cognitive political authority has lasting appeal in
contemporary political philosophy. We find the idea well articulated in Joseph
Raz’ work (e.g. Raz 1986) and in work that builds on that. As I’ll explain in
more detail later (in Chapter 4), Raz argues that political legitimacy depends
on whether a de facto political authority—say a government—is able to track
what there is most reason to do with sufficient reliability. The thought is that if
the citizens are less well placed to track the right decisions themselves, they
should defer to the political authority. Relatedly, those who defend episto-
cratic conceptions of political legitimacy (e.g. Brennan 2016) also invoke
cognitive political authority as the ground of political legitimacy. On an
epistocratic conception, political decision-making should be in the hands of
those who are sufficiently competent. But it’s not only elitist theories that
1 Quoted from the Penguin edition. See also the discussion in Lane’s introduction to this edition on
page xxxiiff.
2 See Skinner (1978: 14ff.).
prioritize cognitive political authority. Some epistemic theories of democracy

are also best interpreted as committed to the view that political legitimacy
stems from cognitive political authority, not the political will. On those
conceptions of democratic legitimacy, cognitive political authority is achieved
by a wisdom-of-the crowds process (e.g. Landemore 2013; Goodin and
Spiekermann 2019).
At a more practical level, we can illustrate the idea that political legitimacy
may stem from cognitive political authority in relation to the political role of
experts. It is often said that experts can only advise, not decide. But this masks
the influence of cognitive political authority on legitimate political decision-
making. To see this influence, consider how we’d assess a government that
disregards overwhelming expertise on a particular political problem. In the
water crisis in Flint, Michigan, for example, the government came under mas-
sive pressure once it was established that the tap water was highly toxic.3 A
democratically elected government can’t legitimately ignore a problem that
threatens the health and the lives of its population, once it’s clear what the
problem is and how it can be remedied. If there is sufficient expertise on a
particular issue, then political decision-makers are left with very little wriggle
room: legitimate political decision-making must then reflect such expertise.
The example shows that there are cases in which cognitive political authority,
and not the political will, settles what political decisions can legitimately
be made.
(c) Epistemic Underdetermination and Epistemic Accountability
While the benefit of expert-led political decision-making in the case of a

water crisis is perhaps obvious, it is also clear that this sort of robust expertise
is not usually available in what we may call the epistemic circumstances of
politics.4 This epistemic problem puts a distinct kind of pressure on cognitive
political authority as the ground of political legitimacy.
3 As Pauli (2019) documents it well, the Flint water crisis also illustrates the importance of demo-
cratic activism. It was activists, not experts, who first drew attention to the problem, and citizens’
participation played an important role throughout the crisis. I return to this issue in Chapter 8
(Section 8.3).
4 I’m echoing Waldron (1999) on the circumstances of politics here. As I’ll explain in chapter 4, the
normal epistemic circumstances of politics are characterized by (i) fragmented bodies of evidence, (ii)
insufficient political competence, and (iii) difficulties with identifying the expert point of view even if
it exists. Estlund (2008) has drawn our attention to (iii), but the first two problems are also
significant.
In the normal epistemic circumstances of politics, there are deep disagree

ments on what response a particular situation requires, including among
experts, and this limits the political decision-making power that experts can
legitimately hold. Cognitive political authority remains epistemically under-
determined in such scenarios. Consider the situation many countries faced
two years into the Covid-19 pandemic. While a lot was at stake, governments
faced the difficult task of weighing a wide range of relevant considerations—
both moral and empirical. Decision-making had to factor in epidemiological
risk, the social, economic, and health effects of prolonged lockdowns, the
management of children’s education, the effects on health services and other
services, and questions about welfare goals versus other goals, including the
protection of liberty. As a result, there was, as is typical in political life, much
room for disagreement, including among experts, and more political wrig-
gle room.
While the epistemic circumstances of politics thus tend to be challenging,
we shouldn’t rule out cognitive political authority as a possible ground of
political legitimacy. A key claim of this book is that the political will isn’t the
only ground of political legitimacy, even though it’s an important ground.
There are at least some occasions in political life that require deference—from
both political decision-makers and ordinary citizens—to cognitive political
authority. I explain this on the basis of our epistemic accountability. Epistemic
accountability is a state of being answerable for our actions—to ourselves and
to others—that depends on our epistemic circumstances. When the epistemic
circumstances are sufficiently favourable, our epistemic accountability implies
that cognitive political authority trumps the political will as a ground of polit
ical legitimacy.
To accommodate favourable as well as unfavourable epistemic circum-
stances, I argue in support of a hybrid conception of political legitimacy.
This hybrid conception recognizes both the political will and cognitive
political authority as possible grounds of legitimacy. I call it the epistemic
accountability conception of political legitimacy. It highlights that legitim
ate political decision-making is subject to epistemic constraints, not just to
support from the political will. But, given the challenging epistemic circum-
stances of politics, it also recognizes the limits of cognitive political author-
ity as a ground of legitimacy. In the normal epistemic circumstances of
politics, political disagreements among the citizens are to be expected and
legitimate political decision- making must respond to well- founded
disagreements.
This way of thinking about political legitimacy is compatible with an

important role for democracy in legitimate political decision-making.5 But
the resulting argument for democracy as a ground of political legitimacy is
importantly different from more standard arguments, whether moral or
epistemic. The claim is neither that democratic decision-making is morally
necessary for political legitimacy, nor that democracy has epistemic benefits
that explain its role in legitimate political decision-making. Instead, the argu-
ment is that the legitimacy of democratic decisions derives from—and is
limit ed to— the resolution of disagreements that remain when cognitive
political authority is epistemically underdetermined. That’s a very important
role, as we’ll see, given the epistemic circumstances of politics. But it’s a differ-
ent take on how democracy contributes to political legitimacy.
To sum up, there are different (meta-normative) answers to the question
of what makes political decisions legitimate. An important distinction is
between answers that prioritize the political will and those that prioritize
cognitive political authority. I argue that what makes political decisions
legitimate depends on the epistemic circumstances. In favourable epistemic
circumstances, cognitive political authority is the ground of political legitimacy.
If cognitive political authority is epistemically underdetermined, however,
which is the normal case in politics, then the political will, suitably understood,
is the ground of political legitimacy. In those normal epistemic circumstances,
legitimate political decision-making responds to well-founded disagree-
ments among the citizens, for example through some form of democratic
decision-making.
Now that I have introduced some of the main themes of this book, it’s time
to turn attention to details of the approach I’m taking. In the next section,
I motivate the normative concern with the legitimacy of political decisions.
In the following section, I explain the advantages of taking a meta-normative,
rather than a normative, approach to the question of what makes political
decisions legitimate.
1.2 The Normative Concern with Political Legitimacy
I take it that if a political decision is legitimate, political office holders or other

decision-makers—e.g. a democratic constituency—have permission to make
5 It doesn’t require democracy, however, as it’s also compatible with other forms of responding to a
diversity of valid political views, for example through some form of sortition (e.g. Guerrero 2014).
that decision and the decision is binding for the citizens.6 Let me unpack this
two-pronged definition of political legitimacy, first, before using it to discuss
the normative concern with political legitimacy.
One reason the study of political legitimacy is notoriously difficult is that
many different definitions of legitimacy abound. In adopting a two-pronged
approach, according to which legitimacy relates to both a permission to make
political decisions and the bindingness of those decisions, I’m broadly follow-
ing Hanna Pitkin (1966: 39):
To call something a legitimate authority is normally to imply that it ought to

be obeyed. You cannot, without further rather elaborate explanation, main-
tain simultaneously both that this government has legitimate authority over
you and that you have no obligation to obey it.7
The relevant connection between a permission to make political decisions

and their bindingness is sometimes understood as conceptual, for example
when the permission to make political decisions is defined, in Hohfeldian
terms, as a right to rule that correlates with a duty to obey (Raz 1986). On my
understanding, which I will explicate as I develop the epistemic accountabil-
ity conception, the connection is normative: the normative grounds of the
permission to make political decisions are also the normative grounds of the
bindingness of those decisions.
(a) A Right to Rule?
I characterize the normative power to make political decisions as a permis-

sion, not as a right to rule. If a political decision is legitimate, the decision-
makers were permitted to make it; if it is illegitimate, the decision-makers
were not permitted to make it. Decision- makers may be governments,
6 As an immigrant and non-citizen resident, I’m well aware that most political decisions a country
makes impact on any resident, not just on citizens, and this raises a question about which decisions
should be binding for all residents. I experimented with different terminology to do justice to this
problem, but didn’t find a satisfactory terminology. In the end I reverted to referring primarily to citi-
zens, and I suggest that “citizen” is read broadly as a stakeholder, in general, which might include
non-citizen residents, for example.
7 While I think some version of this two-pronged understanding of political legitimacy is widely
shared, including by Raz (1986) and Rawls (1993), among others, there are exceptions. Estlund (2008)
and Huemer (2012), for example, propose different interpretations. Buchanan (2002) has a good over-
view of how political philosophers have thought about legitimacy, authority, and obligation, and the
relation between them. See also my SEP article on political legitimacy (Peter 2017).
government agencies, or individual political office holders. Importantly, in a

democracy, they can also be whole democratic constituencies.8 My reason for
characterizing this normative power as a permission, rather than as a right to
rule, is that I want to emphasize that this normative power depends on con-
text, specifically on the epistemic circumstances in which political decisions
are made. The permission to make political decisions can be lost—and move
to a different decision-making body—if the context changes.9
Political decisions matter a great deal and one part of the explanation for
the distinctive normative concern with political legitimacy is that the permis-
sion to make political decisions should thus not come easily. Political deci-
sions shape the lives of large numbers of people, in many respects and often
for a long time. Political decisions come in many forms, but here are some of
the main examples I’ll be focusing on in this book. First, there are decisions to
introduce new laws or reform existing laws. Think of the Brexit decision,
which profoundly changed the economic, social, and political relations of the
UK with the EU. Or think of the decisions related to pandemic management
that governments around the world had to make after the outbreak of
Covid-19. Those decisions had to be made in the face of millions of people’s
lives at stake, and they involved measures with the potential to significantly
interfere with citizens’ livelihoods, well-being, rights, and liberties. No less
weighty are decisions to appoint political office holders, for example a prime
minister or members of parliament. The more powerful the political office is,
the weightier the decision. A third type of political decision introduces new
policies within an existing legal framework, such as a new welfare policy or a
new immigration policy. Even those decisions can be very weighty, as the
controversy around the US immigration policy of separating small children
from their families has shown.
Throughout the book, I will limit my discussion to political decisions made
in the context of state-bound political bodies and constituencies. But I do not
mean to imply that the drawing (or redrawing) of political boundaries is not a
potentially significant decision, or that there aren’t potentially very significant
political decisions to be made at an international or global level, including
decisions that concern the relationships between different constituencies,
such as decisions on immigration, for example.10 These are all very important
political issues. I’m focusing on the national context here because, empirically
8 It is a distinctive feature of democracy that citizens are both the binders and those who are being
bound by democratic decisions—see Hershovitz (2003) on this.
9 For a different view on why a right to rule is too strong, see Applbaum (2019).
10 An excellent recent discussion of these issues can be found in Stilz (2019).
speaking, that’s where most legitimacy challenges arise. In a political world

that would be more institutionally integrated at the international and global
level, this would be the wrong focus. But given how the political world is
organized now, most political decision-making power is organized within
national political constituencies and I’m taking this as my starting point.11
(b) The Bindingness of Political Decisions
Determining who has permission to make a political decision is one reason

why political legitimacy gives rise to a distinctive normative concern. The sec-
ond reason is determining which political decisions are binding for the citi-
zens. For example, if a democratic decision is legitimate, then all citizens are
bound to comply with it, even those citizens who voted against it. Illegitimate
decisions do not have this binding force and there might then be grounds for
the citizens to take further political action or to engage in some form of civil
disobedience.
There are different ways in which the bindingness of political decisions is
understood. Many understand it in terms of duties (e.g. Raz 1986). Others,
more weakly, in terms of being subject to a liability in Hohfeld’s sense (e.g.
Applbaum 2019). On the duty account, citizens are under a duty to obey a
legitimate political decision. On the liability account, a legitimate political
authority has the moral power to create a duty for those under its rule. The
citizens can’t claim immunity from a legitimate political authority. But they
need not be under an obligation to obey, and this leaves room for civil dis
obedience even against legitimate political decisions. The two-pronged defin
ition of political legitimacy that I introduced earlier follows the duty account.
But I share with the liability account the sense that whether there is a duty to
obey a political decision on a particular issue is an important question.
There is a further question of what grounds a duty to obey a political deci-
sion. The simple answer is that some duties are normatively basic. The more
common answer is that the duty to obey a political decision is explained in
terms of reasons to act accordingly (e.g. Raz 1986; Rawls 1993; Darwall 2006;
Gaus 2011a: 246). While this answer is common, there are important differ-
ences among reasons accounts. On one version, favoured by Raz, the duty to
11 Supranational entities with considerable decision-making powers such as the EU and ASEAN
are an important exception to this, however. By taking political boundaries as given, I’m also assum-
ing that the jurisdiction problem does not arise (see Waldron 1993)—I’m focusing on political legit
imacy in relation to governing a given constituency.
obey a legitimate political decision is independent of the citizens’ own

reason ing. On a second version, the bindingness of political decisions
depends on the citizens’ own capacity to rationally bind themselves to act as
directed. I take an intermediary view on this issue, which I’ll explain when
I develop the epistemic accountability conception of political legitimacy.
The bindingness of legitimate political decisions has led many political
philosophers to think that political legitimacy depends on the citizens’ consent
and there is a long tradition in political philosophy that associates political
legitimacy with the consent of the governed (see Locke 1980 [1690], Rousseau
1988 [1762]). On the consent view, political legitimacy derives from an act of
approval (express or tacit) from the citizens. While this is an influential way
of thinking about political legitimacy, and I discuss examples in Chapter 2,
I argue in Chapter 6 that the citizens’ consent is neither conceptually nor
normatively required for legitimate political decision-making.
There is an important alternative view, which is probably the mainstream
view in political philosophy today. On this alternative view, political legitimacy
relates to the reasons that justify political decisions or the way in which they
are made.12 On the latter, which I call the justificationist view of political
legitimacy, the property of political legitimacy is a property of justification of
sorts. The conception of political legitimacy that I develop and defend in this
book is a version of the justificationist view and an important aim of this book
is to explain what sort of justification is at the heart of political legitimacy.13
(c) Legitimacy as a Property of Political Decisions
My definition of political legitimacy characterizes legitimacy as a normative

property of political decisions. As my discussion so far has illustrated, I focus,
in the first instance, on the legitimacy of political decisions, not on the legit
imacy of the body that makes the decision. It’s important to note that this is
merely a methodological commitment, and nothing substantial hinges on
this. If we take a decision-centred approach, the legitimacy of a political
authority is explained in terms of the legitimacy of the decision it makes. If we
12 Horton (2012) draws a similar distinction and labels the two views the libertarian and the
Kantian views of political legitimacy.
13 I’ll comment on the distinction in a number of places below, but a full discussion of my objec-
tions to consent theory and my argument in favour of a justificationist theory can be found in
Chapter 6.
take an institution-centred approach, the legitimacy of political decisions is

explained in terms of the legitimacy of the political authority.
Both approaches are common in the literature on political legitimacy.14 But
I think the decision-centred approach to political legitimacy is an attractive
starting-point for investigating alternative conceptions of political legitimacy
because it makes only minimal assumptions about the concept of legitimacy.
Most importantly, unlike institution-centred approaches, it does not presuppose
a particular account of the institutions in which political decisions are made.
For example, it does not tie legitimate political decisions to a particular type
of state, say a democratic state. As such, the view lends itself to examining a
broad range of conceptions of political legitimacy and of the political institutions
they support.
It might be objected that the decision-centred approach is at odds with the
rich tradition in political thought, going back at least to Hobbes, that takes
political legitimacy to be a property of political institutions such as states. But
the tension is only apparent. As a methodological tool, the decision-centred
approach that I adopt does not presuppose a particular substantive account of
the relationship between legitimate political decisions and the political
institutions in which they are made. It is compatible with an approach that
sees the legitimacy of political decisions as determined by properties of the
institutions in which they are made. Even an account that centres on the
problem of justifying the state, for example, will ultimately distinguish
between legitimate political decisions—those made by a state that satisfies
certain conditions—and illegitimate political decisions.
To add a further point of clarification, note that the normative property of
legitimacy should be distinguished from other normative properties that
political decisions might have. Of particular interest are properties such as
being morally right or just, legal, or efficient. While political legitimacy might
not be completely independent of these other normative properties, it is a
distinct normative concern. The question how legitimacy relates to these
other normative concerns is thus non-trivial.
The difference between legitimacy and the normative property of legality is
worth dwelling on a bit further, as this sometimes creates confusion. A political
decision is legal if it has been made in conformity with relevant law. For
example, the Biden election was legal because relevant election law was
upheld in all US states. An illegal political decision, by contrast, violates
relevant political law. Political legitimacy doesn’t refer to relevant law, at least
14 The decision-centred approach is also common in economics (e.g. Sen 2017).

not in the first instance. Instead, it refers to a conception of political legitimacy.

A legitimate political decision is a decision that satisfies the conditions of the
correct conception of political legitimacy. If the correct conception requires
democratic presidential elections, for example, then a decision that satisfies
the relevant condition(s) is legitimate. The correct conception of political
legitimacy might or might not be reflected in relevant law—for example in
election law. If it is, then legitimacy and legality coincide. If it is not, then the
two might come apart.
It’s a further illustration of the distinctive normative concern with political
legitimacy that legal decisions might be illegitimate. If they are, the decision-
makers are legally permitted to make the decision, and the citizens and other
residents are legally bound to obey that decision, but what is legally sanc-
tioned deviates from what legitimacy would entail about what’s permissible
and obligatory. The normative concern with political legitimacy thus offers a
platform from which the law, including the law regulating political decision-
making, can be critically scrutinized.
In sum, I’ve described political legitimacy as a normative property of
political decisions. If a political decision has this property, there is a permission
to make that decision and the decision is binding. Political decisions might
also have further normative properties, but the concern with legitimacy is
distinct from other normative concerns we might have, including in the
political domain.
1.3 The Meta-normative Perspective
Given that political legitimacy is an important normative concern, we might

ask how political legitimacy relates to other normative concerns. In this book,
I will take a meta-normative approach to the question of what makes political
decisions legitimate, focusing on what I call the grounds of political legitimacy.
(a) Normative versus Meta-normative Approaches
Many debates in political philosophy tend to take place at the first-order level,
including debates about political legitimacy. How important are democratic
values—such as freedom and equality—for political legitimacy? What is more
important for legitimate decision-making, that political decisions are just or
welfare-
enhancing, or that the decision- making process respects certain
political rights? Are citizens bound to obey unjust political decisions, or can
only just decisions be legitimate? These are just some examples of how polit
ical philosophers have debated political legitimacy, focusing on first-order
considerations such as values, rights, and obligations.
These first-order questions are important, and they lead to illuminating
distinctions among competing conceptions of political legitimacy. Consider
the relationship between legitimacy and justice as an example. Most political
philosophers—but not all!—accept that a legitimate political decision need
not be just.15 But what about a just decision? Is it necessarily legitimate? Some
philosophers answer yes (e.g. Rawls 1995). They take the view that justice has
the same normative foundations as legitimacy, but justice is more demanding
than legitimacy. Other philosophers answer no (e.g. Simmons 2001). On that
view, the normative foundations of legitimacy are different from the norma-
tive foundations of justice. Justice and legitimacy just make different norma-
tive demands on political decision-making.
A further distinction among conceptions of political legitimacy originates
at the meta-normative level, not at the (first-order) normative level, and that
distinction cuts across distinctions at the normative level. Conceptions of
political legitimacy differ depending on what they take to be the source of the
normativity of this particular property of political decisions. For example,
how important are subjective considerations—such as consent or the accessi-
bility of the justification for political decisions— relative to objective
considerations—such as the intrinsic rightness of a political decision? The
meta-normative approach foregrounds questions such as the following. Does
political legitimacy necessarily relate to what the citizens want from their
government, or to what they reasonably judge the government should do?
Could a political decision be legitimate even if the majority of the citizens
oppose it? Does it matter for the political legitimacy of a government whether
the decisions it makes are, in fact, the right ones, quite independently of what
anyone thinks? Does legitimate decision-making presuppose that citizens and
governments are well informed?
The meta-normative approach that I take in this book is less common in
political philosophy than the normative approach, but political philosophers
have previously examined meta-normative aspects of theories of political
legitimacy. As I read John Rawls’ work, for example, one of its key contribu-
tions lies in his theory of political justification (Rawls 1993). So-called realist
theories of political legitimacy have also highlighted meta-normative issues,
15 Buchanan (2002) argues that political legitimacy is a criterion of minimal justice.

primarily in relation to the question whether there is a distinctively political

normativity.16 What seems to be missing in both those traditions, however, is
an examination of how the normativity of political legitimacy intertwines
with how philosophers think about normativity in other domains—especially
in meta-ethics and in epistemology.17 One of my main aims in this book is to
offer an account of the normativity of political legitimacy that is continuous
with other work on normativity while still accounting for the distinctive fea-
tures of the political realm.
As I hope will become clear, taking a meta-normative approach offers a
fresh perspective on political legitimacy. It allows us not only to make pro-
gress in understanding why political legitimacy matters and what it requires.
It also allows us to discuss pressing legitimacy-related political issues, such as
the role of experts in political deliberation and political decision-making, the
epistemic responsibilities of citizens, the dangers of authoritarianism, and the
difference between populism and democracy.
(b) Grounds of Political Legitimacy
When we explore the grounds of political legitimacy, it is striking how many

political philosophers, today and throughout the history of modern political
philosophy, take political decisions to be legitimate in virtue of how they
respond to the citizens’ will. The political will may depend on the citizens’
consent or involve some other form of approval, for example through demo-
cratic decision-making, and it may be the citizens’ actual will or a hypothet
ical will. The ground of political legitimacy, on what I call will-based, or
voluntarist, conceptions, is given by the citizens’ own political judgments,
regardless of any factual or epistemic constraints on their validity.
The political will, however important, is not the only possible ground of
political legitimacy. A first alternative account of the ground of political
legitimacy—of what a permission to make binding political decisions is based
on—takes normative facts as the ground of political legitimacy. According
to fact-based conceptions of political legitimacy, political decisions are
16 See e.g. Rossi and Sleat (2014), Leader Maynard and Worsnip (2018), Aytac (2022), and Fossen
(2022) on this.
17 Pragmatist political philosophy is an important exception here—see Misak (2000) and Talisse
(2007, 2009). Another important exception is Gaus’ work (see Gaus 1996, in particular, and also Gaus
2011a). See also Fuerstein (2012), Enoch (2015), and Ferretti (2018), among others. I’ve outlined the
meta-normative approach that I’m taking in this book in Peter (2020).
legitimate in virtue of being the right decisions, presupposing that there is a

sense in which political decisions can be right or wrong independently of
what the citizens believe or otherwise judge to be right. Right decisions, in
other words, are the decisions favoured by the normative facts in given cir-
cumstances. For example, on a factualist view, if the normative facts warrant a
certain reform of the tax system, say because the current system is unjust,
then a decision to reform the tax system accordingly is legitimate because it is
the right thing to do. I also call this account of the grounds of political legit
imacy factualism about political legitimacy, to mirror analogous positions in
ethics and epistemology in relation to the grounds of justified action or
belief.18
A second alternative to will-based conceptions are conceptions that take
political legitimacy to depend on the decision-makers being in a position of
epistemic advantage regarding the question of what political decision is, in
fact, the right decision in a given situation. Earlier, I called this position cog-
nitive political authority. This type of conception of legitimacy is belief-based,
not fact- based— an important distinction. I also call them cognitivist
(Landemore 2013). Belief-based conceptions of political legitimacy underpin
epistocratic conceptions (e.g. Brennan 2016) as well as some conceptions of
epistemic democracy.
An important advantage of the meta-normative approach to political legit
imacy that I’m taking here is that there are only three main accounts of the
grounds of political legitimacy: normative facts, cognitive political authority,
and the political will. This simplifies the inquiry greatly. To see better why
these are the three main alternatives, consider the following set of questions.
First, are the political judgments of at least some citizens part of the ground of
political legitimacy or not? If the answer is that such judgments are irrelevant,
we have what I’ve called factualism about political legitimacy. On this account
of the ground of political legitimacy, political decisions are legitimate in vir-
tue of being the right decisions, but not in virtue of what citizens believe
about those decisions or in virtue of which decisions they support.
If we reject attitude-independent normative facts as the ground of political
legitimacy, as I’ll do in Chapter 3, this leaves us with an account of the ground
of political legitimacy that is attitude-dependent. We then need to consider
whether the relevant attitudes are theoretical— beliefs— or practical. Are
political decisions legitimate in virtue of having been made on the basis of
beliefs that track the right decisions sufficiently well, or in virtue of
18 E.g. Littlejohn (2012) and Scanlon (2014).

responding to the citizens’ own political judgments (actual or hypothetical)?

Answering this question leads us to either belief-based or will-based concep-
tions of political legitimacy. Because there aren’t many possibilities to con-
sider, the meta-normative perspective allows us to focus on a small number of
key questions and it promises significant progress in answering the question
of what makes political decisions legitimate.
(c) Types of Ought
We can further illuminate the distinction between the three main grounds of
political legitimacy by drawing attention to Derek Parfit’s distinction between
three types of ought (Parfit 2011: 150f.). The first, the fact-relative ought, cap-
tures what the normative facts imply ought to be done in a given situation.
This type of ought is involved in what I’ve called political factualism, as fact-
based conceptions explain a permission to make binding political decisions
in terms of the normative facts that obtain in a particular situation.
The second type of ought that Parfit identifies, the evidence-relative ought,
captures what the available evidence implies should be done in a given con-
text. Belief-based conceptions of political legitimacy, as I understand them,
ground the permission to make binding political decisions in being in an
epistemically advantageous position relative to what the evidence implies
should be done. The legitimacy of a political decision depends on how well
the decision-makers’ beliefs—or the beliefs of their advisors—track the evi-
dence that is available about which political decision the normative facts
favour in the circumstances. Such cognitivist conceptions highlight that a
government or other decision-making body that fails to respond appropri-
ately to available evidence does not have cognitive political authority and thus
lacks a permission to make binding political decisions.
Parfit calls the third type of ought a belief-relative ought, but that termin
ology clashes with the terminology I’m using here. This third type of ought is
a judgment of what should be done that is relative to a given doxastic state.
I propose we call this third type the practical ought. Will-based conceptions
marshal this practical ought, as they attribute a fundamental normative power
to the citizens’ own political judgments, without imposing factual or epi
stemic constraints on the validity of their judgments. So on those concep-
tions, the permission to make political decisions and the obligation to obey
depend on how political decision-making responds to the citizens’ own
political judgments.
(d) The Normative Role of Political Deliberation
The meta-normative perspective is helpful not only to distinguish between

different accounts of what grounds a permission to make binding political
decisions. It also sheds light on the normative role of political deliberation.
Political deliberation is a collective reasoning process in which citizens scru
tinize past political decisions and proposals for new political decisions as well
as the actions of political decision-makers. But how, exactly, does political
deliberation contribute to legitimate political decision-making? We’ll see that
there are will-based and belief-based answers to this question that deserve to
be taken seriously. According to the former, exemplified by classic delibera-
tive democracy theories, the normative role of political deliberation relates to
reaching an agreement among the citizens (e.g. Gutmann and Thompson
1996). According to the latter, exemplified by some theories of epistemic
democracy, it’s the epistemic value of well-conducted political deliberation
that matters (e.g. Landemore 2013). I engage with this issue in Chapters 6 and 7,
where I argue for a theory of political deliberation that combines elements
of both.
(e) Procedure versus Substance
Having explained the meta-normative approach that I’m taking in this book, we
now need to consider how it can illuminate debates about political legitimacy
that centre on first-order normative considerations. In particular, it might be
objected that the distinctions drawn at the meta-normative level merely mirror
distinctions drawn at the first-order level. If that were the case, exploring the
grounds of political legitimacy would not illuminate existing debates.
Someone pushing this objection might argue that the distinction that I am
drawing between different grounds of political legitimacy is just a restatement
of the procedure versus substance distinction that has long occupied debates
on political legitimacy (Cohen 1997a). Will-based conceptions are proced
ural, the objection might hold. According to those conceptions, the legitim
acy of political decisions derives from appropriate political decision-making
procedures, for example democratic procedures. Belief-based and fact-based
conceptions, by contrast, the objection continues, are substantive, as they
relate political legitimacy to the quality of the decisions made.
If this objection was warranted, then the meta- normative perspective
would just add an unnecessary terminological layer. Not much would be
gained from exploring the distinction between different grounds of political

legitimacy that cannot be explored at the level of the distinction between pro
cedural and substantive conceptions of political legitimacy.
A bit of reflection shows that the distinction between the grounds of polit
ical legitimacy and the procedure and substance distinction cut across each
other. First, note that the objection lumps together both fact-based and belief-
based conceptions. I think that there is an important difference between
them, as I’ll explain in Chapters 3 and 4. In addition, even if we ignore fact-
based conceptions and focus just on will-based and belief-based conceptions,
this opens up a two-by-two matrix of alternative conceptions of political
legitimacy. Will-based conceptions of legitimacy may be either substantive or
procedural. And belief-based conceptions, too, come in substantive and pro
cedural variants.
To see this, consider procedural conceptions of political legitimacy first. As
I now understand those conceptions, they hold that some kind of decision-
making procedure—for example a democratic procedure—is necessary for
political legitimacy. On purely procedural conceptions, the procedure is also
sufficient. Many will-based conceptions of legitimacy are indeed procedural,
as I’ll explain in more detail later. But belief-based conceptions can also be
procedural. Some epistemic theories of democracy are a case in point (e.g.
Landemore 2013; Goodin and Spiekermann 2019). They support a procedural
conception of political legitimacy because they see democratic decision-
making procedures as necessary for political legitimacy. But they do not
account for legitimacy on voluntarist grounds. The classic version of epi
stemic theories of democracy, going back to the marquis de Condorcet, holds
that what makes democratic decisions legitimate isn’t that they are an appro-
priate expression of the political will. Instead, it is democracy’s ability to tap
into what is informally called the wisdom of the crowds. The conceptions of
political legitimacy that underly those theories are thus not will-based; they
are belief-based. The ground of political legitimacy is the superior ability of
democratic procedures to select correct beliefs about what the right decision
is in given circumstances.19
19 There’s a related distinction between the instrumental and the intrinsic value of democracy.
Standard epistemic theories of democracy are typically interpreted as valuing democracy instrumen-
tally, for its ability to make the right decisions, in contrast to theories that see democracy as intrinsic
ally valuable (e.g. Christiano 2008). The distinction I’m focusing on here is whether (democratic)
procedures are necessary for political legitimacy or not. Standard epistemic theories of democracy
answer that they are because they outperform other decision-making procedures. Substantive theories
of political legitimacy, by contrast, hold that political legitimacy doesn’t depend on a particular deci-
sion procedure; only on the outcomes.
A similar comment can be made in relation to conceptions of political

legitimacy that prioritize substance over procedures. Many belief-based con-
ceptions indeed prioritize substance, and Raz’ service conception that I have
already mentioned, and that I’ll discuss in more detail later, is a good example
(e.g. Raz 1986). But some will-based conceptions also prioritize substance.
The public reason conception put forward by Gerald Gaus (2011a), which
takes political legitimacy to depend on whether the citizens’ reasons for sup-
porting particular decisions converge, is a good example.20 What confers
legitimacy, on this conception, is not a collective decision-making procedure,
but the fact that political decisions are supported by reasons of the right kind.
These examples show that distinctions between competing conceptions of
political legitimacy drawn at the first-order level might obscure important
differences at the meta-normative level. Theories of democratic legitimacy,
while procedural, may be either will-based or belief-based. And theories of
political legitimacy that relate political legitimacy to the substantive justifica-
tion of political decisions may also be based on different accounts of the
grounds of political legitimacy— some more subjective and others more
objective. Before we can consider the relative significance of procedures and
outcomes for political legitimacy, we thus need a better grasp of the grounds
of political legitimacy: are political decisions legitimate in virtue of how they
respond to the citizens’ will, or to cognitive political authority, or in virtue of
being warranted by normative facts?
In short, the methodological framework that I’m relying on in this book
allows us to take a fresh look at the question of what makes political decisions
legitimate. The question itself is by no means new, of course. But the benefits
of taking a meta-normative approach to answering this question remain
underexplored, and re-examining the question of what makes political deci-
sions legitimate is important in light of both authoritarian and populist pres-
sures on democracy. As I hope will become clear, focusing on the grounds of
political legitimacy reveals that there is a previously overlooked but promis-
ing answer to the question of what makes political decisions legitimate.
20 Gaus’ public reason conception of political legitimacy takes political decisions to be justified in
virtue of a convergence of reasons. Some of Rawls’ writing suggests such a view, e.g. Rawls (1993); see
Peter (2009) for a critical discussion.
2
The Political Will
Does political legitimacy ultimately depend on how political decision-making

responds to the will of the citizens? In this chapter, my first aim is to shed
light on the richness of this important tradition of thinking about political
legitimacy. I then discuss the normative significance of the political will. Why
have so many thought that the political will is the ground of political legitim
acy? I trace this back to the assumption that citizens are equally politically
authoritative. In the final section of this chapter, I push back against the idea
that citizens are always equally politically authoritative, which leads me to
conclude that the political will can’t be the only ground of political legitimacy.
The problem that all will-based conceptions face, and which current histor
ical developments make vivid, is that they are at risk of supporting undue
arbitrariness in political decisions.
2.1 Will-Based Conceptions of Political Legitimacy
Will-based conceptions, as we saw, take political decisions to be legitimate in

virtue of how they respond to the political will, understood as some reflection
of the political judgments of the citizens. I also call those conceptions volun-
tarist. In this section, I give an overview of will-based conceptions. For clarifi-
cation, I understand such conceptions as committed to an inclusive political
voluntarism: what makes political decisions legitimate is how they respond to
the citizens’ will. Inclusive political voluntarism contrasts with the exclusive
political voluntarism found in divine command theories, but I won’t discuss
the latter in this book. Applied to the political context, a divine command
theory holds that legitimate political decisions are those willed by God.1
1 A version of the divine command theory of political legitimacy can be found in ancient Chinese
philosophy. Both Confucius and Mencius held that a “mandate of heaven” underpins legitimate polit
ical rule; see Nuyen (2013).
The Grounds of Political Legitimacy. Fabienne Peter, Oxford University Press. © Fabienne Peter 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198872382.003.0002
(a) The Invention of the Political Will
It was primarily from the 17th century onwards that the citizens’ will came to
be seen as the main ground of political legitimacy. This development parallels
what J. B. Schneewind (1998) calls the invention of individual autonomy in
moral philosophy. Influential early developments of the idea that the political
will is the ground of political legitimacy can be found in the works of Hugo
Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, and Samuel Pufendorf, for example (see Hampton
1998; Schneewind 1998). Hugo Grotius, in On the Law of War and Peace,
describes this way of thinking about political legitimacy as follows:
as there are several Ways of Living, some better than others, and every one
may chuse which he pleases of all those Sorts; so a People may chuse what
Form of Government they please: Neither is the Right which the Sovereign
has over his Subjects to be measured by this or that Form, of which divers
Men have different Opinions, but by the Extent of the Will of those who
conferred it upon him. (cited by Tuck 1993: 193)
This passage illustrates the core commitment of will-based conceptions very

well, it being that political legitimacy must be grounded in the citizens’ will.
As Grotius frames it, the “Right which the Sovereign has over his Subjects” is
derived from the “Will of those who conferred [this right] to him,” i.e. the
citizens. The passage also hints at an argument for this core claim, which is
that because there is no authority beyond the citizens’ will on how to live, the
only ground for the legitimacy of political decisions is accordance with the
citizens’ will. Building on this, we can thus also characterize will-based con-
ceptions as committed to the citizens’ equal political authoritativeness. Given
the equal political authoritativeness of the citizens, will-based conceptions
take political decisions to be legitimate in virtue of how they respond to the
citizens’ own political judgments.
The passage I just quoted also highlights some further key features of what
I call will-based conceptions of political legitimacy. One is that they construe
the problem of political legitimacy as a practical problem, focusing on the
citizens’ ability to make their own choices and forming their own judgments
about what should be done. The will, as I understand it, is a practical faculty,
involved in deciding what to do. I exercise my will if I decide on one course of
action over another, for example if I decide to continue working on this book
instead of taking the day off. Of course, sometimes we act in ways that resem-
ble knee-jerk reactions and acting in these ways will partially or fully bypass
The Political Will 25
the will. Our choices may also sometimes be more illusory than real, driven
by sub-personal processes we don’t fully control. Even so, the need to choose
how to act is often very real and unavoidable, and the will is the faculty
through which we settle what to do.
A further feature of will-based conceptions of political legitimacy is that
they foreground potential disagreements among the citizens on how to
choose. As Grotius also makes clear in the passage just quoted, citizens who
exercise their will well might end up favouring different political decisions,
thus disagreeing with each other about what political decision should be
made. If the citizens’ wills have the potential to conflict, this raises the ques-
tion of how to adjudicate between those potentially conflicting judgments.
Will-based conceptions take this to be the key problem for the legitimacy of
political decisions.2
Responding to the citizens’ will can take many different forms and different
will-based conceptions favour different forms of adjudication between the
citizens’ wills. Importantly, there are what I call justificationist and consent
versions of will-based conceptions, drawing on a distinction I introduced in
Chapter 1. Will-based conceptions of political legitimacy that are committed
to the consent view link the citizens’ will to their capacity to express or with-
hold consent. Justificationist versions link the citizens’ will to their capacity to
respond to reasons. This is an important distinction, but a proper discussion
of this distinction has to wait until Chapter 6 (Section 6.1).
In this section, my aim is to give an overview of the three main categories
of will-based conceptions, to shed light on the richness of this tradition. We
can identify three main categories of will-based conceptions, and I’ll discuss
them in turn: unanimity conceptions, public reason conceptions, and partici-
pation conceptions.3
(b) Unanimity
Historically, the most important category of will-based conceptions is that of

unanimity conceptions. In general, unanimity conceptions take political
decisions to be legitimate in virtue of them having been made unanimously—or
at least near-unanimously—or if the decisions themselves, or the way in
2 I use the term “adjudication” as a neutral description of responding to the citizens’ will; adjudica-
tion might include aggregation through voting, collective deliberation, finding consensus, seeking
consent, etc.
3 This list is not intended to exclusive and there might also be mixed conceptions.
which they are made, attract unanimous, or near-unanimous consent,

whether it’s expressed or tacit.
Unanimity conceptions have been influentially articulated in the early
social contract theories, for example by Hobbes, or in the works of John Locke
and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.4 According to Hobbes, the ground of political
legitimacy is the consent of all citizens to a social contract. The social contract
is necessary to create political authority and, as a result, the possibility of
legitimate political decisions (Hampton 1998). In making his argument for
the normative significance of consent, Hobbes compares the state of nature
with the civic state. In the state of nature, the citizens are free to act on the
basis of their own wills. But they are also under threat from each other—life
in the state of nature is “nasty, brutish, and short,” Hobbes writes in the
Leviathan (2017 [1651]). The citizens can protect themselves by giving away
their natural liberty right and consenting to be ruled by a political authority.
Their unanimous consent is the ground of political legitimacy because it cre-
ates a political authority that is entitled to decide on behalf of the citizens and
make binding decisions.5 As Hobbes puts it (2017 [1651]: 17.13): “the only
way to erect a commonwealth [a political authority] is by conferring all [the
citizens’] power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men,
that may reduce all their wills . . . unto one will.”
Many have argued that Hobbes fails to distinguish adequately between
legitimacy- conferring consent and mere submission (Hampton 1998). If
they’re right, then Hobbes collapses the distinction between legitimate polit
ical decisions and the decisions of a de facto, but not legitimate, authority. But
be this as it may, because Hobbes doesn’t make many demands on the type of
consent that can give rise to legitimate political decisions, we can call his view
a brute unanimity view.
In Locke’s version of a will-based conception of political legitimacy, the
normative significance of the citizens’ equal political authoritativeness comes
clearly into view. We might call Locke’s view a qualified unanimity view. For
Locke, what I call the citizens’ equal political authoritativeness is enshrined
in the moral law that governs the state of nature. In this state of nature,
all individuals are equally free to act within the constraints of natural law
4 I deliberately left out Kant’s conception of political legitimacy here, although important, because I
interpret it as an early version of a public reason conception.
5 “and when a man hath in either manner abandoned or granted away his right, then is he said to
be OBLIGED or BOUND not to hinder those to whom such a right is granted or abandoned from the
benefit of it; and [it is said] that he ought, and it is his DUTY, not to make void that voluntary act of
his own” (Hobbes 2017 [1651]: 14.7).
and no individual is subject to the will of another. As Rawls (2007: 129)

characterizes Locke’s understanding of the state of nature, it is “a state of
equal right, all being kings.”
Natural law, while manifest in the state of nature, is not sufficiently specific
to rule a society and cannot enforce itself when violated, however. Again the
problem of disagreement and conflict looms. The solution to this problem is a
social contract that transfers authority to a political body—e.g. a civil state—
that can realize and secure the natural law. And the political decisions that
this body might make will be legitimate in virtue of the individuals’ consent:
“no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the political power of
another without his own consent” (Locke 1980 [1690]: 52). And anyone who
has given their express or tacit consent to the social contract is bound to obey
a state’s laws (Locke 1980 [1690]: 63).
Rousseau presents another version of a qualified unanimity view. Compared
to Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau focuses more directly on the question that is
also at the heart of this book, namely the question of what makes political
decisions legitimate. Rousseau famously gave a democratic answer to this
question. Political decisions are legitimate, on Rousseau’s view, in virtue of
them having been made in democratic fashion and reflecting what Rousseau
calls the general will. As Rousseau writes:
The engagements that bind us to the social body are obligatory only because
they are mutual . . . the general will, to be truly such, should be general in its
object as well as in its essence; . . . it should come from all to apply to all.6
The general will, which confers legitimacy to political decisions, is general in

two senses. It is general with regard to its source—the general will is the will
of the citizen-body as a whole. And it is general with regard to its content—
the will reflects the common good, rather than some partisan interests. The
latter idea of generality also qualifies the former, in the following way.
Rousseau distinguishes between a citizen’s private will, which reflects personal
interests, a citizen’s general will, which reflects an interpretation of the
common good, and the general will, which truly reflects the common good.
The citizens’ will that confers legitimacy to political decisions is their inter-
pretation of the common good, rather than their own private interests.
The emphasis on democracy raises a question, however, as democratic
decisions are not normally unanimous. So why would those who oppose a
6 Rousseau (1988 [1792]: II:4). See also Rousseau (1988 [1792]: I:3) and Rawls (2007: 231f.).
particular decision be bound by that decision? And in what sense is Rousseau’s

version of a will-based conception of legitimacy an instance of an unanimity
conception? The answer to these questions is the following. On Rousseau’s
view, citizens can—and will want to—learn from democratic decisions. Since
the democratic decision, if conducted properly, correctly reveals the general
will, those who voted against a particular proposal will recognize that they
were mistaken about the common good and will adjust their beliefs about
what the general will is. In this ingenious way, individuals are only bound by
their own will, but everyone is bound by a democratic decision.7
Good examples of versions of the unanimity view in contemporary polit
ical philosophy can be found in contributions from James Buchanan and
Gordon Tullock (1962), Leslie Green (1988), John Simmons (2001, 2005),
Amanda Greene (2016), and Anna Stilz (2019). In all those proposals, it is
either unanimous decision-making or some form of consent that is taken to
be the right way of adjudicating between the citizens’ wills and, therefore, as
the ground of political legitimacy.
(c) Public Reason
In contemporary philosophy, an important alternative to unanimity concep-

tions are public reason conceptions. The difference between unanimity con-
ceptions and public reason conceptions is that the latter focus on the reasons
that justify political decisions or the ways in which they are made, whereas
the former focus either on the citizens’ endorsement as such—of particular
decisions or of the way in which they are made—or on their rational choice.
Contemporary public reason conceptions, which were foreshadowed by
Kant in his writings on political philosophy, have their origin in the concep-
tion of political legitimacy that John Rawls put forward in Political Liberalism
(1993) and elaborated on in his “Reply to Habermas” (1995) and in Juergen
Habermas’ work on deliberative democracy (Habermas 1996). Rawls’ version
of a will-based conception of legitimacy has the following “liberal principle of
legitimacy” at its core (Rawls 1993: 137):
7 This part of Rousseau’s argument incorporates elements of a belief-based conception of political

legitimacy, and there are parallels to the sort of arguments that epistemic democrats make; see
Grofman and Feld (1988) and footnote 16 in this chapter.
Our exercise of political power is fully proper only when it is exercised in

accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens as free and
equal may reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of principles and
ideals acceptable to their common human reason.
This characterization of the liberal principle of legitimacy contains quite a few

technical terms that would take too long to unpack here. But, translated into
the terminology I am using in this book, it claims that political decisions are
legitimate in virtue of how they respond to what citizens, understood as rea-
sonable persons, can agree on. A reasonable person, according to Rawls, is
willing to propose and abide by fair terms of cooperation—terms of cooper
ation that all citizens can agree on—and accepts that the search for such an
agreement is affected by epistemic limitations (by the “burdens of judgment”).8
The relevant agreement is on the basis of reasons that all citizens, understood
as reasonable persons, can share. So the liberal principle of legitimacy speci-
fies that political decisions are legitimate only if they are made in accordance
with a constitution that is justified by reasons that all reasonable persons
can share.
Generally speaking, public reason conceptions treat the property of
legitimacy as dependent on the—procedural or substantive—reasons that
reasonable persons have. Public reasons are either reasons that all reasonable
persons share, as in Rawls’ original public reason conception of legitimacy, or,
while they are not shared, support the same political decision or decision-
making procedure.9 What all public reason conceptions of political legitimacy
have in common is that they take public reasons to justify a political decision—or
the decision-making process—and this justification is thought to constitute
the property of legitimacy.10
(d) Participation
According to participation conceptions, a third main category of will-based

conceptions, political decisions are legitimate in virtue of them having been
8 See Rawls (1993: lecture II).

9 The distinction I am drawing here is sometimes called the distinction between consensus and
convergence accounts of public reason (Vallier 2011, see also Vallier and Muldoon 2021). Rawlsian
conceptions are called consensus conceptions (e.g. Quong 2011 and Hartley and Watson 2018), while
Gaus (2011a) is the main example for a convergence conception.
10 See Simmons (2001) for an influential critique of public reason conceptions of political legitimacy,
focusing on Kant and Rawls, in particular.
made in a process that allows for the equal participation of all citizens. To
paraphrase Bernard Manin (1987), what participation conceptions have in
common is that they see political legitimacy as dependent on the participation
of all, not on the unanimous will of all or on the reasons all citizens have.
A classic discussion of participation as a source of political legitimacy is
found in Carol Pateman (1970). Pateman criticizes the dominant theory of
democracy of her time, due mainly to Schumpeter (1942), for unduly restricting
the citizens’ opportunities to express their will. Her alternative, participatory
conception of political legitimacy focuses on the educational effects of
political participation. Pateman argues that active participation of the citizens
in all aspects of political decision-making is necessary to enable citizens to
acquire essential democratic skills. Acquiring those skills then allows them to
have an equal say and that ensures that democratic decision-making appro-
priately reflects the political will. Less participatory forms of democracy
can’t ensure political legitimacy because they only reflect the political will of
an elite.11
Many recent defences of democracy also rely on a participation conception
of political legitimacy. David Viehoff (2014), for example, argues that demo-
cratic decisions are legitimate in virtue of them being made via procedures
that give all citizens an equal say.12 As he puts it (2014: 374):
democratic decisions at least sometimes have special authority because they

are made by procedures in which all citizens have an equal say. But, contrary
to what one might expect . . ., this is not because equality requires us to treat
other people’s judgments as reasons for action. It is, rather, because, by
treating as binding the outcome of an egalitarian decision procedure, we can
avoid acting on various considerations—in particular, unequal power—that
we have reason to exclude from our relationship.
As the quote highlights, this participation conception doesn’t trace political

legitimacy to either the citizens’ unanimous consent or to the reasons they
have to support a political decision. Instead, it traces it to a decision-making
procedure that affords all citizens an equal say, protecting them from being
subject to unequal power relations.
Strongly procedural deliberative democratic conceptions (e.g. Manin
1987), as well as Philipp Pettit’s equal control view of political legitimacy
11 For a nuanced discussion of representative democracy, see Urbinati (2006).

12 Kolodny (2014a, 2014b) defends a similar view; see also Buchanan (2002).
(Pettit 2012) are also good examples of participation conceptions. They build
on the premise that the response to the citizens’ potentially conflicting wills is
via a decision-making procedure that protects the citizens’ equal freedom to
express their wills. According to Pettit, what is key for political legitimacy is
that political decisions are made in the right way, without suppressing any-
one’s political freedom. Democracy, he argues, is uniquely able to ensure the
citizens’ non-domination.
This short overview served to illustrate the diversity of will-based concep-
tions and the variety of interpretations that defenders of those conception
have offered for how the political will bears on political legitimacy. In the next
section, I will further probe their core claim, that political decisions are legit
imate in virtue of how they respond to the citizens’ will. Once we have a
clearer understanding of what will-based conceptions have in common, we
can then consider an objection that targets all will-based conceptions, and
that aims to show that the political will can’t be the sole ground of political
legitimacy, in the final section of this chapter.
2.2 Equal Political Authoritativeness
Why think that the political will is the ground of political legitimacy? To
many, the answer might seem obvious: where, other than from the citizens
themselves, could a permission or a right to make binding political decisions
originate? If political decisions are to settle what citizens can and can’t do,
doesn’t the legitimacy of those decisions ultimately depend on the citizens?
As we shall see more clearly in later chapters, while this is a common line of
thought in political philosophy, this is not the only way to think about the
ground of political legitimacy. There are two important alternative accounts.
But before we consider those, it’s worth getting clearer on the appeal of will-
based conceptions.
(a) Self-Originating Sources of Valid Claims
As I see it, the best way to characterize will-based conceptions of political

legitimacy is via their core meta-normative commitment to the fundamental
equal political authoritativeness of the citizens. Historically, we find this com-
mitment articulated in Locke’s phrase of all citizens “being kings” (1980
[1690]: 66), for example. In the contemporary literature, perhaps the most
memorable articulation is Rawls’ characterization of citizens as capable of

being “self-originating sources of valid claims.”13 Stephen Darwall, building
on Rawls, articulates the core commitment of will-based conceptions of polit
ical legitimacy as follows (2010: 278):
The basic premise underlying any successful justification of differential

authority . . . is that we share a common basic authority to make claims of
each other just by virtue of being persons. Or, as Rawls put the point, to be a
person is to be a ‘self-originating source of valid claims’.
In a political context, valid claims, I take it, are political judgments—

judgments about what should be done—that have some normative force.
Specifically, they have the potential to impact on legitimate political decision-
making—to contribute to the legitimacy of a decision, or to undermine a
decision that would otherwise have been legitimate.14 If citizens are self-
originating sources of valid political claims, this implies that all citizens enjoy
an equal political authoritativeness, with no citizens being in a superior—
more authoritative—position in relation to legitimate political decision-making.
Gerald Gaus (2011a: 15) articulates the commitment to equal authorita
tiveness as follows, highlighting the moral dimension of political decisions:
moral persons are all equally authoritative interpreters of the demands that
morality places on one. This . . . is not to say that they are all equally correct,
or that one person’s judgment is as good as the next. The claim is about the
lack of authority of another’s judgment over one’s view of the demands of
morality.
In taking the citizens as equally politically authoritative, as persons capable of

being “self-originating sources of valid claims,” or as “equally authoritative
interpreters” of what should be done, what is denied, in the first instance, is
that the source of political legitimacy is how well political decisions track
some normative facts that obtain in given circumstances, independently of
the citizens’ own will-formation processes. Instead, the idea is that the
permission to make binding political decisions derives from the exercise
of the citizens’ own political judgment. Using terminology from Chapter 1
13 Rawls (1980: 543). Rawls introduced this conception of the person in his essay on Kantian con-
structivism, but he remained committed to it in later work (e.g. Rawls 1993: 32).
14 I’ll have a lot more to say on how to understand the validity of political judgments in Part II of
the book, when I discuss political deliberation.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
BOOK II
ESSAYS IN PRACTICAL EDUCATION
CHAPTER I
THE PHILOSOPHER AT HOME

“He has such a temper, ma’am!”
And there, hot, flurried, and, generally at her wits’ end, stood the
poor nurse at the door of her mistress’s room. The terrific bellowing
which filled the house was enough to account for the maid’s distress.
Mrs. Belmont looked worried. She went up wearily to what she well
knew was a weary task. A quarter of an hour ago life had looked
very bright—the sun shining, sparrows chirping, lilac and laburnum
making a gay show in the suburban gardens about; she thought of
her three nestlings in the nursery, and her heart was like a singing-
bird giving out chirps of thanks and praise. But that was all changed.
The outside world was as bright as ever, but she was under a cloud.
She knew too well how those screams from the nursery would spoil
her day.
There the boy lay, beating the ground with fists and feet; emitting
one prodigious roar after another, features convulsed, eyes
protruding, in the unrestrained rage of a wild creature, so
transfigured by passion that even his mother doubted if the noble
countenance and lovely smile of her son had any existence beyond
her fond imagination. He eyed his mother askance through his
tumbled, yellow hair, but her presence seemed only to aggravate the
demon in possession. The screams were more violent; the beating of
the ground more than ever like a maniac’s rage.
“Get up, Guy.”
Renewed screams; more violent action of the limbs!
“Did you hear me, Guy?” in tones of enforced calmness.
The uproar subsided a little, but when Mrs. Belmont laid her hand
on his shoulder to raise him, the boy sprang to his feet, ran into her,
head-foremost, like a young bull, kicked her, beat her with his fists,
tore her dress with his teeth, and would no doubt have ended by
overthrowing his delicate mother, but that Mr. Belmont, no longer
able to endure the disturbance, came up in time to disengage the
raging child and carry him off to his mother’s room. Once in, the key
was turned upon him, and Guy was left to “subside at his leisure,”
said his father.
Breakfast was not a cheerful meal, either upstairs or down. Nurse
was put out; snapped up little Flo, shook baby for being tiresome,
until she had them both in tears. In the dining-room, Mr. Belmont
read the Times with a frown which last night’s debate did not
warrant; sharp words were at his tongue’s end, but, in turning the
paper, he caught sight of his wife’s pale face and untasted breakfast.
He said nothing, but she knew and suffered under his thoughts fully
as much as if they had been uttered. Meantime, two closed doors
and the wide space between the rooms hardly served to dull the ear-
torturing sounds that came from the prisoner.
All at once there was a lull, a sudden and complete cessation of
sound. Was the child in a fit?
“Excuse me a minute, Edward;” and Mrs. Belmont flew upstairs,
followed shortly by her husband. What was her surprise to see Guy
with composed features contemplating himself in the glass! He held
in his hand a proof of his own photograph which had just come from
the photographer’s. The boy had been greatly interested in the
process; and here was the picture arrived, and Guy was solemnly
comparing it with that image of himself which the looking-glass
presented.
Nothing more was said on the subject; Mr. Belmont went to the
City, and his wife went about her household affairs with a lighter
heart than she had expected to carry that day. Guy was released,
and allowed to return to the nursery for his breakfast, which his
mother found him eating in much content and with the sweetest face
in the world; no more trace of passion than a June day bears when
the sun comes out after a thunderstorm. Guy was, indeed, delicious;
attentive and obedient to Harriet, full of charming play to amuse the
two little ones, and very docile and sweet with his mother, saying
from time to time the quaintest things. You would have thought he
had been trying to make up for the morning’s fracas, had he not
looked quite unconscious of wrong-doing.
This sort of thing had gone on since the child’s infancy. Now, a
frantic outburst of passion, to be so instantly followed by a sweet
April-day face and a sunshiny temper that the resolutions his parents
made about punishing or endeavouring to reform him passed away
like hoar-frost before the child’s genial mood.
A sunshiny day followed this stormy morning; the next day passed
in peace and gladness, but, the next, some hair astray, some
crumpled rose-leaf under him, brought on another of Guy’s furious
outbursts. Once again the same dreary routine was gone through;
and, once again, the tempestuous morning was forgotten in the
sunshine of the child’s day.
Not by the father, though: at last, Mr. Belmont was roused to give
his full attention to the mischief which had been going on under his
eyes for nearly the five years of Guy’s short life. It dawned upon him
—other people had seen it for years—that his wife’s nervous
headaches and general want of tone might well be due to this
constantly recurring distress. He was a man of reading and
intelligence, in touch with the scientific thought of the day, and
especially interested in what may be called the physical basis of
character,—the interaction which is ever taking place between the
material brain and the immaterial thought and feeling of which it is
the organ. He had even made little observations and experiments,
declared to be valuable by his friend and ally, Dr. Steinbach, the
head physician of the county hospital.
For a whole month he spread crumbs on the window-sill every
morning at five minutes to eight; the birds gathered as punctually,
and by eight o’clock the “table” was cleared and not a crumb
remained. So far, the experiment was a great delight to the children,
Guy and Flo, who were all agog to know how the birds knew the
time.
After a month of free breakfasts: “You shall see now whether or
no the birds come because they see the crumbs.” The prospect was
delightful, but, alas! this stage of the experiment was very much
otherwise to the pitiful childish hearts.
“Oh, father, please let us put out crumbs for the poor little birds,
they are so hungry!” a prayer seconded by Mrs. Belmont, met with
very ready acceptance. The best of us have our moments of
weakness.
“Very interesting,” said the two savants. “Nothing could show
more clearly the readiness with which a habit is formed in even the
less intelligent of the creatures.”
“Yes, and more than that, it shows the automatic nature of the
action once the habit is formed. Observe, the birds came punctually
and regularly when there were no longer crumbs for them. They did
not come, look for their breakfast, and take sudden flight when it was
not there, but they settled as before, stayed as long as before, and
then flew off without any sign of disappointment. That is, they came,
as we set one foot before another in walking, just out of habit,
without any looking for crumbs, or conscious intention of any sort, a
mere automatic or machine-like action with which conscious thought
has nothing to do.”
Of another little experiment Mr. Belmont was especially proud,
because it brought down, as it were, two quarries at a stroke;
touched heredity and automatic action in one little series of
observations. Rover, the family dog, appeared in the first place as a
miserable puppy saved from drowning. He was of no breed to speak
of, but care and good living agreed with him. He developed a
handsome shaggy white coat, a quiet, well-featured face, and
betrayed his low origin only by one inveterate habit; carts he took no
notice of, but never a carriage, small or great, appeared in sight but
he ran yelping at the heels of the horses in an intolerable way,
contriving at the same time to dodge the whip like any street Arab.
Oddly enough, it came out through the milkman that Rover came of
a mother who met with her death through this very peccadillo.
Here was an opportunity. The point was, to prove not only that the
barking was automatic, but that the most inveterate habit, even an
inherited habit, is open to cure.
Mr. Belmont devoted himself to the experiment: he gave orders
that, for a month, Rover should go out with no one but himself. Two
pairs of ears were on the alert for wheels; two, distinguished
between carriage and cart. Now Rover was the master of an
accomplishment of which he and the family were proud: he could
carry a newspaper in his mouth. Wheels in the distance, then, “Hi!
Rover!” and Rover trotted along, the proud bearer of the Times. This
went on daily for a month, until at last the association between
wheels and newspaper was established, and a distant rumble would
bring him up—a demand in his eyes. Rover was cured. By-and-by
the paper was unnecessary, and “To heel! good dog!” was enough
when an ominous falling of the jaw threatened a return of the old
habit.
It is extraordinary how wide is the gap between theory and
practice in most of our lives. “The man who knows the power of habit
has a key wherewith to regulate his own life and the lives of his
household, down to that of the cat sitting at his hearth.” (Applause.)
Thus, Mr. Belmont at a scientific gathering. But only this morning did
it dawn upon him that, with this key between his fingers, he was
letting his wife’s health, his child’s life, be ruined by a habit fatal alike
to present peace, and to the hope of manly self-possession in the
future. Poor man! he had a bad half-hour that morning on his way
Citywards. He was not given to introspection, but, when it was forced
upon him, he dealt honestly.
“I must see Steinbach to-night, and talk the whole thing out with
him.”
“Ah, so; the dear Guy! And how long is it, do you say, since the
boy has thus out-broken?”
“All his life, for anything I know—certainly it began in his infancy.”
“And do you think, my good friend”—here the Doctor laid a hand
on his friend’s arm, and peered at him with twinkling eyes and
gravely set mouth—“do you think it possible that he has—a—
inherited this little weakness? A grandfather, perhaps?”
“You mean me, I know; yes, it’s a fact. And I got it from my father,
and he, from his. We’re not a good stock. I know I’m an irascible
fellow, and it has stood in my way all through life.”
“Fair and softly, my dear fellow! go not so fast. I cannot let you say
bad things of my best friend. But this I allow; there are thorns,
bristles all over; and they come out at a touch. How much better for
you and for Science had the father cured all that!”
“As I must for Guy! Yes, and how much happier for wife, children,
and servants; how much pleasanter for friends. Well, Guy is the
question now. What do you advise?”
The two sat far into the night discussing a problem on the solution
of which depended the future of a noble boy, the happiness of a
family. No wonder they found the subject so profoundly interesting
that two by the church clock startled them into a hasty separation.
Both ladies resented this dereliction on the part of their several lords.
They would have been meeker than Sarah herself had they known
that, not science, not politics, but the bringing up of the children, was
the engrossing topic.
Breakfast-time three days later. Scene, the dining-room.

Nurse in presence of Master and Mistress.
“You have been a faithful servant and good friend, both to us and
the children, Harriet, but we blame you a little for Guy’s passionate
outbreaks. Do not be offended, we blame ourselves more. Your
share of blame is that you have worshipped him from his babyhood,
and have allowed him to have his own way in everything. Now, your
part of the cure is, to do exactly as we desire. At present, I shall only
ask you to remember that, Prevention is better than cure. The thing
for all of us is to take precautions against even one more of these
outbreaks.
“Keep your eye upon Guy; if you notice—no matter what the
cause—flushed cheeks, pouting lips, flashing eye, frowning
forehead, with two little upright lines between the eyebrows, limbs
held stiffly, hands, perhaps, closed, head thrown slightly back; if you
notice any or all of these signs, the boy is on the verge of an
outbreak. Do not stop to ask questions, or soothe him, or make
peace, or threaten. Change his thoughts. That is the one hope. Say
quite naturally and pleasantly, as if you saw nothing, ‘Your father
wants you to garden with him,’ or, ‘for a game of dominoes;’ or, ‘your
mother wants you to help her in the store-room,’ or, ‘to tidy her work-
box.’ Be ruled by the time of the day, and how you know we are
employed. And be quite sure we do want the boy.”
“But, sir, please excuse me, is it any good to save him from
breaking out when the passion is there in his heart?”
“Yes, Harriet, all the good in the world. Your master thinks that
Guy’s passions have become a habit, and that the way to cure him is
to keep him a long time, a month or two, without a single outbreak; if
we can manage that, the trouble will be over. As for the passion in
his heart, that comes with the outer signs, and both will be cured
together. Do, Harriet, like a good woman, help us in this matter, and
your master and I will always be grateful to you!”
“I’m sure, ma’am,” with a sob (Harriet was a soft-hearted woman,
and was very much touched to be taken thus into the confidence of
her master and mistress). “I’m sure I’ll do my best, especially as I’ve
had a hand in it; but I’m sure I never meant to, and, if I forget, I hope
you’ll kindly forgive me.”
“No, Harriet, you must not forget, any more than you’d forget to
snatch a sharp knife from the baby. This is almost a matter of life and
death.”
“Very well, sir; I’ll remember, and thank you for telling me.”
Breakfast-time was unlucky; the very morning after the above talk,
Nurse had her opportunity. Flo, for some inscrutable reason,
preferred to eat her porridge with her brother’s spoon. Behold, quick
as a flash, flushed cheeks, puckered brow, rigid frame!
“Master Guy, dear,” in a quite easy, friendly tone (Harriet had
mastered her lesson), “run down to your father; he wants you to help
him in the garden.”
Instantly the flash in the eye became a sparkle of delight, the rigid
limbs were all active and eager; out of his chair, out of the room,
downstairs, by his father’s side in less time than it takes to tell. And
the face—joyous, sparkling, full of eager expectation—surely Nurse
had been mistaken this time? But no; both parents knew how quickly
Guy emerged from the shadow of a cloud, and they trusted Harriet’s
discretion.
“Well, boy, so you’ve come to help me garden? But I’ve not done
breakfast. Have you finished yours?”
“No, father,” with a dropping lip.
“Well, I’ll tell you what. You run up and eat your porridge and
come down as soon as you’re ready; I shall make haste, too, and we
shall get a good half-hour in the garden before I go out.”
Up again went Guy with hasty, willing feet.
“Nurse” (breathless hurry and importance), “I must make haste
with my porridge. Father wants me directly to help him in the
garden.”
Nurse winked hard at the fact that the porridge was gobbled. The
happy little boy trotted off to one of the greatest treats he knew, and
that day passed without calamity.
“I can see it will answer, and life will be another thing without
Guy’s passions; but do you think, Edward, it’s right to give the child
pleasures when he’s naughty—in fact, to put a premium upon
naughtiness, for it amounts to that?”
“You’re not quite right there. The child does not know he is
naughty; the emotions of ‘naughtiness’ are there; he is in a physical
tumult, but wilfulness has not set in; he does not yet mean to be
naughty, and all is gained if we avert the set of the will towards
wrong doing. He has not had time to recognise that he is naughty,
and his thoughts are changed so suddenly that he is not in the least
aware of what was going on in him before. The new thing comes to
him as naturally and graciously as do all the joys of the childish day.
The question of desert does not occur.”
For a week all went well. Nurse was on the alert, was quick to
note the ruddy storm-signal in the fair little face; never failed to
despatch him instantly, and with a quiet unconscious manner, on
some errand to father or mother; nay, she improved on her
instructions; when father and mother were out of the way, she herself
invented some pleasant errand to cook about the pudding for dinner;
to get fresh water for Dickie, or to see if Rover had had his breakfast.
Nurse was really clever in inventing expedients, in hitting instantly on
something to be done novel and amusing enough to fill the child’s
fancy. A mistake in this direction would, experience told her, be fatal;
propose what was stale, and not only would Guy decline to give up
the immediate gratification of a passionate outbreak—for it is a
gratification, that must be borne in mind—but he would begin to look
suspiciously on the “something else” which so often came in the way
of this gratification.
Security has its own risks. A morning came when Nurse was not
on the alert. Baby was teething and fractious, Nurse was overdone,
and the nursery was not a cheerful place. Guy, very sensitive to the
moral atmosphere about him, got, in Nurse’s phrase, out of sorts. He
relieved himself by drumming on the table with a couple of ninepins,
just as Nurse was getting baby off after a wakeful night.
“Stop that noise this minute, you naughty boy! Don’t you see your
poor little brother is going to sleep?” in a loud whisper. The noise
was redoubled, and assisted by kicks on chair-rungs and table-legs.
Sleep vanished and baby broke into a piteous wail. This was too
much; the Nurse laid down the child, seized the young culprit, chair
and all, carried him to the furthest corner, and, desiring him not to
move till she gave him leave, set him down with a vigorous shaking.
There were days when Guy would stand this style of treatment
cheerfully, but this was not one. Before Harriet had even noted the
danger signals, the storm had broken out. For half-an-hour the
nursery was a scene of frantic uproar, baby assisting, and even little
Flo. Half-an-hour is nothing to speak of; in pleasant chat, over an
amusing book, the thirty minutes fly like five; but half-an-hour in
struggle with a raging child is a day and a night in length. Mr. and
Mrs. Belmont were out, so Harriet had it all to herself, and it was
contrary to orders that she should attempt to place the child in
confinement; solitude and locked doors involved risks that the
parents would, rightly, allow no one but themselves to run. At last the
tempest subsided, spent, apparently, by its own force.
A child cannot bear estrangement, disapproval; he must needs
live in the light of a countenance smiling upon him. His passion over,
Guy set himself laboriously to be good, keeping watch out of the
corner of his eye to see how Nurse took it. She was too much vexed
to respond in any way, even by a smile. But her heart was touched;
and though, by-and-by, when Mrs. Belmont came in, she did say
—“Master Guy has been in one of his worst tempers again, ma’am:
screaming for better than half-an-hour”—yet she did not tell her tale
with the empressement necessary to show what a very bad half-hour
they had had. His mother looked with grave reproof at the
delinquent, but she was not proof against his coaxing ways.
After dinner she remarked to her husband, “You will be sorry to
hear that Guy has had one of his worst bouts again. Nurse said he
screamed steadily for more than half-an-hour.”
“What did you do?”
“I was out at the time, doing some shopping. But when I came
back, after letting him know how grieved I was, I did as you say,
changed his thoughts and did my best to give him a happy day.”
“How did you let him know you were grieved?”
“I looked at him in a way he quite understood, and you should
have seen the deliciously coaxing, half-ashamed look he shot up at
me. What eyes he has!”
“Yes, the little monkey! and no doubt he measured their effect on
his mother; you must allow me to say that my theory certainly is not
to give him a happy day after an outbreak of this sort.”
“Why, I thought your whole plan was to change his thoughts, to
keep him so well occupied with pleasant things that he does not
dwell on what agitated him.”
“Yes, but did you not tell me the passion was over when you
found him?”
“Quite over, he was as good as gold.”
“Well, the thing we settled on was to avert a threatened outbreak
by a pleasant change of thought; and to do so in order that, at last,
the habit of these outbreaks may be broken. Don’t you see, that is a
very different thing from pampering him with a pleasant day when he
has already pampered himself with the full indulgence of his
passion?”
“Pampered himself! Why, you surely don’t think those terrible
scenes give the poor child any pleasure. I always thought he was a
deal more to be pitied than we.”
“Indeed I do. Pleasure is perhaps hardly the word; but that the
display of temper is a form of self indulgence, there is no doubt at all.
You, my dear, are too amiable to know what a relief it is to us irritable
people to have a good storm and clear the air.”
“Nonsense, Edward! But what should I have done? What is the
best course after the child has given way?”
“I think we must, as you suggested before, consider how we
ourselves are governed. Estrangement, isolation, are the immediate
consequences of sin, even of what may seem a small sin of
harshness and selfishness.”
“Oh, but don’t you think that is our delusion? that God is loving us
all the time, and it is we who estrange ourselves?”
“Without doubt; and we are aware of the love all the time, but,
also, we are aware of a cloud between us and it; we know we are out
of favour. We know, too, there is only one way back, through the fire.
It is common to speak of repentance as a light thing, rather pleasant
than otherwise; but it is searching and bitter: so much so, that the
Christian soul dreads to sin, even the sin of coldness, from an almost
cowardly dread of the anguish of repentance, purging fire though it
is.”
Mrs. Belmont could not clear her throat to answer for a minute.
She had never before had such a glimpse into her husband’s soul.
Here were deeper things in the spiritual life than any of which she yet
knew.
“Well then, dear, about Guy; must he feel this estrangement, go
through this fire?”
“I think so, in his small degree; but he must never doubt our love.
He must see and feel that it is always there, though under a cloud of
sorrow which he only can break through.”
Guy’s lapse prepared the way for further lapses. Not two days
passed before he was again hors de combat. The boy, his outbreak
over, was ready at once to emerge into the sunshine. Not so his
mother. His most bewitching arts met only with sad looks and
silence.
He told his small scraps of nursery news, looking in vain for the
customary answering smile and merry words. He sidled up to his
mother, and stroked her cheek; that did not do, so he stroked her
hand; then her gown; no answering touch, no smile, no word;
nothing but sorrowful eyes when he ventured to raise his own. Poor
little fellow! The iron was beginning to enter; he moved a step or two
away from his mother, and raised to hers eyes full of piteous doubt
and pleading. He saw love, which could not reach him, and sorrow,
which he was just beginning to comprehend. But his mother could
bear it no longer: she got up hastily and left the room. Then the little
boy, keeping close to the wall, as if even that were something to
interpose between him and this new sense of desolation, edged off
to the furthest corner of the room, and sinking on the floor with a sad,
new quietness, sobbed out lonely sobs; Nurse had had her lesson,
and although she, too, was crying for her boy, nobody went near him
but Flo. A little arm was passed round his neck; a hot little cheek
pressed against his curls:
“Don’t cry, Guy!” two or three times, and when the sobs came all
the thicker, there was nothing for it but that Flo must cry too; poor
little outcasts!
At last bedtime came, and his mother; but her face had still that
sad, far-away look, and Guy could see she had been crying. How he
longed to spring up and hug her and kiss her as he would have done
yesterday. But somehow he dared not; and she never smiled nor
spoke, and yet never before had Guy known how his mother loved
him.
She sat in her accustomed chair by the little white bed, and
beckoned the little boy in his nightgown to come and say his prayers.
He knelt at his mother’s knee as usual, and then she laid her hands
upon him.
“‘Our Father’—oh, mother, mo—o—ther, mother!” and a torrent of
tears drowned the rest, and Guy was again in his mother’s arms, and
she was raining kisses upon him, and crying softly with him.
Next morning his father received him with open arms.
“So my poor little boy had a bad day yesterday!”
Guy hung his head and said nothing.
“Would you like me to tell you how you may help ever having quite
such another bad day?”
“Oh yes, please, father; I thought I couldn’t help.”
“Can you tell when the ‘Cross-man’ is coming?”
Guy hesitated. “Sometimes, I think. I get all hot.”
“Well, the minute you find he’s coming, even if you have begun to
cry, say, ‘Please excuse me, Nurse,’ and run downstairs, and then
four times round the garden as fast as you can, without stopping to
take breath!”
“What a good way! Shall I try it now?”
“Why, the ‘Cross-man’ isn’t there now. But I’ll tell you a secret: he
always goes away if you begin to do something else as hard as you
can; and if you can remember to run away from him round the
garden, you’ll find he won’t run after you; at the very worst, he won’t
run after you more than once round!”
“Oh, father, I’ll try! What fun! See if I don’t beat him! Won’t I just
give Mr. ‘Cross-man’ a race! He shall be quite out of breath before
we get round the fourth time.”
The vivid imagination of the boy personified the foe, and the
father jumped with his humour. Guy was eager for the fray; the
parents had found an ally in their boy; the final victory was surely
within appreciable distance.
“This is glorious, Edward; and it’s as interesting as painting a

picture or writing a book! What a capital device the race with Mr.
‘Cross-man’ is! It’s like ‘Sintram.’ He’ll be so much on the qui vive for
‘Cross-man’ that he’ll forget to be cross. The only danger I see is that
of many false alarms. He’ll try the race, in all good faith, when there
is no foe in pursuit.”
“That’s very likely; but it will do no harm. He is getting the habit of
running away from the evil, and may for that be the more ready to
run when ’tis at his heels; this, of running away from temptation, is
the right principle, and may be useful to him in a thousand ways.”
“Indeed, it may be a safeguard to him through life. How did you
get the idea?”
“Do you remember how Rover was cured of barking after
carriages? There were two stages to the cure; the habit of barking
was stopped, and a new habit was put in its place; I worked upon the
recognised law of association of ideas, and got Rover to associate
the rumble of wheels with a newspaper in his mouth. I tried at the
time to explain how it was possible to act thus on the ‘mind’ of a
dog.”
“I recollect quite well, you said that the stuff—nervous tissue, you
called it—of which the brain is made is shaped in the same sort of
way—at least so I understood—by the thoughts that are in it, as the
cover of a tart is shaped by the plums below. And then, when there’s
a place ready for them in the brain, the same sort of thoughts always
come to fill it.”
“I did not intend to say precisely that,” said Mr. Belmont, laughing,
“especially the plum part. However, it will do. Pray go on with your
metaphor. It is decided that plums are not wholesome eating. You
put in your thumb, and pick out a plum; and that the place may be
filled, and well filled, you pop in a—a—figures fail me—a peach!”
“I see! I see! Guy’s screaming fits are the unwholesome plum
which we are picking out, and the running away from Cross-man the
peach to be got in instead. (I don’t see why it should be a peach
though, unpractical man!) His brain is to grow to the shape of the
peach, and behold, the place is filled. No more room for the
plum.”[21]
“You have it; you have put, in a light way, a most interesting law,
and I take much blame to myself that I never thought, until now, of
applying it to Guy’s case. But now I think we are making way; we
have made provision for dislodging the old habit and setting a new
one in its place.”
“Don’t you think the child will be a hero in a very small way, when
he makes himself run away from his temper?”
“Not in a small way at all; the child will be a hero. But we cannot
be heroes all the time. In sudden gusts of temptation, God grant him
grace to play the hero, if only through hasty flight; but in what are
called besetting sins, there is nothing safe but the contrary besetting
good habit. And here is where parents have such infinite power over
the future of their children.”
“Don’t think me superstitious and stupid; but somehow this
scientific training, good as I see it is, seems to me to undervalue the
help we get from above in times of difficulty and temptation.”
“Let me say that it is you who undervalue the virtue, and limit the
scope of the Divine action. Whose are the laws Science labours to
reveal? Whose are the works, body or brain, or what you like, upon
which these laws act?”
“How foolish of me! How one gets into a way of thinking that God
cares only for what we call spiritual things. Let me ask you one more
question. I do see that all this watchful training is necessary, and do
not wish to be idle or cowardly about it. But don’t you think Guy
would grow out of these violent tempers naturally, as he gets older?”
“Well, he would not, as youth or man, fling himself on the ground
and roar; but no doubt he would grow up touchy, fiery, open at any
minute to a sudden storm of rage. The man who has too much self-
respect for an open exhibition may, as you know well enough, poor
wife, indulge in continual irritability, suffer himself to be annoyed by
trifling matters. No, there is nothing for it but to look upon an irate
habit as one to be displaced by a contrary habit. Who knows what
cheerful days we may yet have, and whether in curing Guy I may not
cure myself? The thing can be done; only one is so lazy about one’s
own habits. Suppose you take me in hand?”
“Oh, I couldn’t! and yet it’s your only fault, dear.”
“Only fault! well, we’ll see. In the meantime there’s another thing I
wish we could do for Guy—stop him in the midst of an outbreak. Do
you remember the morning we found him admiring himself in the
glass?”
“Yes, with the photograph in his hand.”
“That was it; perhaps the Cross-man race will answer even in the
middle of a tempest. If not, we must try something else.”
“It won’t work.”
“Why not?”
“Guy will have no more rages; how then can he be stopped in
mid-tempest?”
“Most hopeful of women! But don’t deceive yourself. Our work is
only well begun, but that, let us hope, is half done.”
His father was right. Opportunities to check him in mid-career

occurred; and Guy answered to the rein. Mr. Cross-man worked
wonders. A record of outbreaks was kept; now a month intervened;
two months; a year; two years; and at last his parents forgot their
early troubles with their sweet-tempered, frank-natured boy.
FOOTNOTES:
[21] To state the case more accurately, certain cell
connections appear to be established by habitual traffic in
certain thoughts; but there is so much danger of over-
stating or of localising mental operations, that perhaps it is
safe to convey the practical outcome of this line of research
in a more or less figurative way—as, the wearing of a field-
path; the making of a bridge; a railway, &c.
CHAPTER II
ATTENTION.
“But now for the real object of this letter (does it take your breath
away to get four sheets?) We want you to help us about Kitty. My
husband and I are at our wits’ end, and should most thankfully take
your wise head and kind heart into counsel. I fear we have been
laying up trouble for ourselves and for our little girl. The ways of
nature are, there is no denying it, very attractive in all young
creatures, and it is so delightful to see a child do as ‘’tis its nature to,’
that you forget that Nature, left to herself, produces a waste, be it
never so lovely. Our little Kitty’s might so easily become a wasted
life.
“But not to prose any more, let me tell you the history of Kitty’s
yesterday—one of her days is like the rest, and you will be able to
see where we want your help.
“Figure to yourself the three little heads bent over ‘copy-books’ in
our cheery schoolroom. Before a line is done, up starts Kitty.
“‘Oh, mother, may I write the next copy—s h e l l? “Shell” is so
much nicer than—k n o w, and I’m so tired of it.’
“‘How much have you done?’
“‘I have written it three whole times, mother, and I really can’t do it
any more! I think I could do—s h e l l. “Shell” is so pretty!’
“By-and-by we read; but Kitty cannot read—can’t even spell the
words (don’t scold us, we know it is quite wrong to spell in a reading
lesson), because all the time her eyes are on a smutty sparrow on
the topmost twig of the poplar; so she reads, ‘W i t h, birdie!’ We do
sums; a short line of addition is to poor Kitty a hopeless and an
endless task. ‘Five and three make—nineteen,’ is her last effort,
though she knows quite well how to add up figures. Half a scale on
the piano, and then—eyes and ears for everybody’s business but her
own. Three stitches of hemming, and idle fingers plait up the hem or
fold the duster in a dozen shapes. I am in the midst of a thrilling
history talk: ‘So the Black Prince——’ ‘Oh, mother, do you think we
shall go to the sea this year? My pail is quite ready, all but the
handle, but I can’t find my spade anywhere!’
“And thus we go on, pulling Kitty through her lessons somehow;
but it is a weariness to herself and all of us, and I doubt if the child
learns anything except by bright flashes. But you have no notion how
quick the little monkey is. After idling through a lesson she will
overtake us at a bound at the last moment, and thus escape the
wholesome shame of being shown up as the dunce of our little party.
“Kitty’s dawdling ways, her restless desire for change of
occupation, her always wandering thoughts, lead to a good deal of
friction, and spoil our schoolroom party, which is a pity, for I want the
children to enjoy their lessons from the very first. What do you think
the child said to me yesterday in the most coaxing pretty way?
‘There are so many things nicer than lessons! Don’t you think so,
mother?’ Yes, dear aunt, I see you put your finger on those unlucky
words ‘coaxing, pretty way,’ and you look, if you do not say, that
awful sentence of yours about sin being bred of allowance. Isn’t that
it? It is quite true; we are in fault. Those butterfly ways of Kitty’s were
delicious to behold until we thought it time to set her to work, and
then we found that we should have been training her from her
babyhood. Well,
‘If you break your plaything yourself, dear,
Don’t you cry for it all the same?
I don’t think it is such a comfort
To have only oneself to blame.’
“So, like a dear, kind aunt, don’t scold us, but help us to do better. Is
Kitty constant to anything? you ask. Does she stick to any of the
‘many things so much nicer than lessons’? I am afraid that here, too,
our little girl is ‘unstable as water.’ And the worst of it is, she is all

The Grounds of Political Legitimacy Fabienne Peter Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

The Grounds of Political Legitimacy Fabienne Peter Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Grounds of Political Legitimacy Fabienne Peter Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Grounds of Political Legitimacy

7. Epistemic Norms of Political Deliberation 143

I first started working on political legitimacy in the context of my doctoral

Northwestern University; New Directions in Public Reason conference,

involved in organising the event. I received many excellent questions and

“Epistemic Norms of Political Deliberation.” In Michael Hannon and

“Truth and Uncertainty in Political Justification.” In Elizabeth Edenberg

“Political Legitimacy under Epistemic Constraints: Why Public Reasons

1.1 What Makes Political Decisions Legitimate?

(a) The Political Will

Many think that political legitimacy depends on some form of democratic

(b) Cognitive Political Authority

rule—­rule by those who have cultivated expertise in identifying the right

there will be no end to the troubles of states, or . . . of humanity itself, till

prioritize cognitive political authority. Some epistemic theories of democracy

(c) Epistemic Underdetermination and Epistemic Accountability

While the benefit of expert-­led political decision-­making in the case of a

In the normal epistemic circumstances of politics, there are deep dis­agree­

This way of thinking about political legitimacy is compatible with an

1.2 The Normative Concern with Political Legitimacy

I take it that if a political decision is legitimate, political office holders or other

To call something a legitimate authority is normally to imply that it ought to

The relevant connection between a permission to make political decisions

(a) A Right to Rule?

I characterize the normative power to make political decisions as a permis-

government agencies, or individual political office holders. Importantly, in a

speaking, that’s where most legitimacy challenges arise. In a political world

(b) The Bindingness of Political Decisions

Determining who has permission to make a political decision is one reason

obey a legitimate political decision is independent of the citizens’ own

(c) Legitimacy as a Property of Political Decisions

My definition of political legitimacy characterizes legitimacy as a normative

take an institution-­centred approach, the legitimacy of political decisions is

14 The decision-­centred approach is also common in economics (e.g. Sen 2017).

not in the first instance. Instead, it refers to a conception of political legitimacy.

1.3 The Meta-­normative Perspective

Given that political legitimacy is an important normative concern, we might

(a) Normative versus Meta-­normative Approaches

15 Buchanan (2002) argues that political legitimacy is a criterion of minimal justice.

primarily in relation to the question whether there is a distinctively political

(b) Grounds of Political Legitimacy

When we explore the grounds of political legitimacy, it is striking how many

le­git­im­ate in virtue of being the right decisions, presupposing that there is a

18 E.g. Littlejohn (2012) and Scanlon (2014).

responding to the citizens’ own political judgments (actual or hypothetical)?

(c) Types of Ought

(d) The Normative Role of Political Deliberation

The meta-­normative perspective is helpful not only to distinguish between

(e) Procedure versus Substance

gained from exploring the distinction between different grounds of political

A similar comment can be made in relation to conceptions of political

Does political legitimacy ultimately depend on how political decision-­making

2.1 Will-­Based Conceptions of Political Legitimacy

Will-­based conceptions, as we saw, take political decisions to be legitimate in

(a) The Invention of the Political Will

This passage illustrates the core commitment of will-­based conceptions very

Historically, the most important category of will-­based conceptions is that of

which they are made, attract unanimous, or near-­unanimous consent,

rule—rule by those who have cultivated expertise in identifying the right

While the benefit of expert-led political decision-making in the case of a

In the normal epistemic circumstances of politics, there are deep disagree

take an institution-centred approach, the legitimacy of political decisions is

14 The decision-centred approach is also common in economics (e.g. Sen 2017).

1.3 The Meta-normative Perspective

(a) Normative versus Meta-normative Approaches

legitimate in virtue of being the right decisions, presupposing that there is a

The meta-normative perspective is helpful not only to distinguish between

Does political legitimacy ultimately depend on how political decision-making

2.1 Will-Based Conceptions of Political Legitimacy

Will-based conceptions, as we saw, take political decisions to be legitimate in

This passage illustrates the core commitment of will-based conceptions very

Historically, the most important category of will-based conceptions is that of

which they are made, attract unanimous, or near-unanimous consent,

7 This part of Rousseau’s argument incorporates elements of a belief-based conception of political

According to participation conceptions, a third main category of will-based

(a) Self-Originating Sources of Valid Claims

As I see it, the best way to characterize will-based conceptions of political

In a political context, valid claims, I take it, are political judgments—