Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations for Rawls’s texts
- Introduction
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- 109 Law of Peoples
- 110 Law, system of
- 111 Least-advantaged position
- 112 Legitimacy
- 113 Legitimate expectations
- 114 Leibniz, G. W.
- 115 Leisure
- 116 Lexical priority: liberty, opportunity, wealth
- 117 Liberal conception of justice
- 118 Liberal people
- 119 Liberalism as comprehensive doctrine
- 120 Liberalism, comprehensive vs. political
- 121 Libertarianism
- 122 Liberty, equal worth of
- 123 Liberty of conscience
- 124 Locke, John
- 125 Love
- 126 Luck egalitarianism
- M
- N
- O
- P
- R
- S
- T
- U
- W
- Bibliography
- Index
112 - Legitimacy
from L
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations for Rawls’s texts
- Introduction
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- 109 Law of Peoples
- 110 Law, system of
- 111 Least-advantaged position
- 112 Legitimacy
- 113 Legitimate expectations
- 114 Leibniz, G. W.
- 115 Leisure
- 116 Lexical priority: liberty, opportunity, wealth
- 117 Liberal conception of justice
- 118 Liberal people
- 119 Liberalism as comprehensive doctrine
- 120 Liberalism, comprehensive vs. political
- 121 Libertarianism
- 122 Liberty, equal worth of
- 123 Liberty of conscience
- 124 Locke, John
- 125 Love
- 126 Luck egalitarianism
- M
- N
- O
- P
- R
- S
- T
- U
- W
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Political legitimacy does not figure in Rawls’s early work, notably in A Theory of Justice. In Theory he does make use of the broader idea of “legitimate expectations” that citizens come to have when they participate in a social practice, but his main concern is to specify the principles of justice to which the basic structure of society, including the structure of political authority, must conform. Not surprisingly, legitimacy is a major theme of his later work, in which he develops his account of political liberalism. Legitimacy figures in two principal ways: one is the idea of “legitimate law,” and the other is the “principle of legitimacy,” or what he sometimes calls the “liberal (or democratic) principle of legitimacy.” Both of these uses are related to the conventional notion of a legitimate authority as having the right to exercise political power to make a law or decide policy, with those subject to that authority having at least a presumptive obligation to obey. For Rawls, legitimate law results from a properly constituted political process, and “is politically (morally) binding on [one] as a citizen and is to be accepted as such” (CP 578). Such a properly constituted process must accord with the principle of legitimacy.
The principle of legitimacy arises directly from the defining problem of political liberalism, which is to explain how a society can be well-ordered by a conception of justice when its citizens adhere to conflicting comprehensive doctrines, each of which may give rise to its own conception of justice. Political liberalism solves that problem by proposing a political conception of justice that all reasonable citizens may accept because it is not based upon the concepts or principles of any particular comprehensive doctrine.
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- The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon , pp. 422 - 427Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014
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