Legitimacy and the Practice of Political Judgement

Abstract

To students of political thought, it seems that rulers (and rules) have always been subject to a judgement as to their ‘right’, a judgement generally framed in terms of ‘legitimacy’. As the current volume attests, questions of legitimacy remain central to our political inquiries. These questions are particularly significant when considering governance beyond the state, where emerging relations of power are increasingly subject to normative evaluation — by professional political thinkers, as well as the broader public — and thus inviting, or even demanding, some form of legitimation.