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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2021
In Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration, Anna Stilz argues that legitimate political authority requires the actual—rather than hypothetical—consent of the governed. I argue, however, that her analysis of that consent is inconsistent, in the weight it ascribes to the felt desire to refrain from doing politics with some particular group of people. In the context of secession and self-determination, the lack of actual consent to shared political institutions is weighty enough to render such institutions presumptively illegitimate. In the context of migration, however, a lack of actual consent to the presence of newcomers is ascribed nearly no weight, and instead is taken as evidence of irrationality or immoral preferences. I argue that this apparent contradiction must be clarified before Stilz's overall account of self-governance can be accepted.
1 Stilz, Anna, Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. All parenthetical page references to Stilz in this essay refer to this book.
2 Stilz, Anna, Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 The election of Donald Trump in 2016 came as a shock to most pundits. For a sense of how unexpected that election was, see David A. Graham, “Donald Trump's Stunning Upset,” The Atlantic, November 8, 2016.
4 Dahl, Robert A., A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956)Google Scholar; and Christiano, Thomas, The Rule of the Many: Fundamental Issues in Democratic Theory (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996)Google Scholar.
5 Phillips, Patrick, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016)Google Scholar.
6 Ibid.
7 Julian Borger, “Donald Trump Denounces ‘Globalism’ in Nationalist Address to the UN,” Guardian, September 24, 2019, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/24/donald-trump-un-address-denounces-globalism.
