Liberal legitimacy : a study of the normative foundations of liberalism
Abstract
This thesis is a critique of the prominent strand of contemporary liberal political
theory which maintains that liberal political authority must, in some sense, rest
on the free consent of those subjected to it, and that such a consensus is
achieved if a polity’s basic structure can be publicly justified to its citizenry, or to
a relevant subset of it. Call that the liberal legitimacy view. I argue that the
liberal legitimacy view cannot provide viable normative foundations for political
authority, for the hypothetical consensus it envisages cannot be achieved and
sustained without either arbitrarily excluding conspicuous sectors of the citizenry
or commanding a consent that is less than free. That is because the liberal
legitimacy view’s structure is one that requires a form of consent that carries
free-standing normative force (i.e. normative force generated by voluntariness),
yet the particular form of hypothetical consent through public justification
envisaged by the view does not possess such force, because of its built-in bias in
favour of liberalism. I also argue that the liberal legitimacy view is the most
recent instantiation of one of two main strands of liberal theory, namely the
nowadays dominant contract-based liberalism, which seeks to ground liberal
political authority in a hypothetical agreement between the citizens. My case
against the liberal legitimacy view, then, contributes to the revitalisation of the
other main approach to the normative foundations of liberalism, namely the
substantivist one, which legitimates liberal political authority through an appeal
to the substantive values and virtues safeguarded and promoted by liberal
polities.
Type
Thesis, PhD Doctor of Philosophy
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