Facing Authority fills a sizeable gap in the literature on political legitimacy by providing an intriguing analysis of what we are doing when we ask whether a regime is legitimate. The result is a meta-normative theory of political legitimacy, which offers a pragmatist take on the meaning of ‘legitimacy’, the nature of inquiry into a regime’s legitimacy and the virtues that conduce to doing it well, and the ontology of political persons, communities, and events. The presentation is exceptionally clear. Fossen helpfully recurs to the same three examples in which a regime’s standing to rule is contested in order to illustrate the conclusions that follow from his arguments. By contesting the meta-normative presuppositions of much contemporary writing on political legitimacy, Facing Authority jumpstarts a long overdue debate in contemporary political theory.

Philosophers often frame their inquiries as investigations into the nature or essence of something. Rather than ask what legitimacy is, Fossen begins by asking what it is that actors do when they assert that the regime governing them is (il)legitimate. His answer is that such assertions make explicit actors’ heretofore implicit practical stance vis-à-vis the regime, making it possible to subject their stances to critical assessment. Drawing on work by Robert Brandom, Fossen characterizes an agent’s practical stance inferentially: to take the regime to be (il)legitimate is to respond to its attempt to rule in certain ways, and also to commit to having certain reasons that warrant one’s stance toward the regime. If we conceive of assertions of the regime’s (il)legitimacy as moves within the game of giving and asking for reasons, then a theory of political legitimacy should aim to provide insight into that activity: how we engage in it, and what qualifies specific forms of engagement as better or worse.

The standard approach to theorizing political legitimacy, which Fossen labels ‘normativism’, implicitly relies on a familiar philosophical picture of practical judgment that presumes a division between mind and world. Judging is construed as a matter of individuals bringing principles to bear on a case. The task for a philosophical theory of political legitimacy, then, is to identify the principles that individuals should bring to bear on the case of a regime’s attempt to rule. Furthermore, judgment treats both principles and the features of the case to which they are to be applied as determined prior to the act of judging. Consequently, the normativist picture draws a sharp divide between political philosophy and political action. Judgment is a purely intellectual activity, a private mental act that precedes (but does not necessitate) any public action, and therefore good judgment is a matter of theoretical acuity. Over the course of the book Fossen challenges all of these features of the normativist picture of practical judgment and details various ways in which its presupposition leads theorists to offer unduly narrow and incomplete responses to the problem of legitimacy.

Fossen develops an account of political judgment as a ‘complex of activities through which our sense of political reality is constituted, maintained, transformed, and sometimes subverted’ (p. 69). So construed, political judgment has much in common with the notion of inquiry defended by classical pragmatists such as Peirce and Dewey. It is a temporally extended, intersubjective, and open-ended activity in which subjects continuously attune themselves to political reality, much as the natural sciences are a temporally extended, intersubjective, and open-ended activity in which we continuously attune ourselves to physical reality. Just as our conduct inferentially commits us to certain positions in the domains of physics, chemistry, and biology, even if we have never reflected on them (and so made those positions explicit), so too our actions warrant attributing to us a certain practical stance toward the regime regardless of what has gone on ‘inside our head’. Moreover, the meaning of our action depends on an ongoing social and political practice of interpretation. Political reality is constituted and reconstituted via a practice of giving and taking reasons in which all commitments are, in principle, subject to revision.

This abstract depiction of judging political legitimacy as a continuous practice of attunement to political reality takes more concrete form in the second half of the book, where Fossen considers three activities that figure centrally in it. The first concerns the portrayal of the regime. How are the political authorities represented, by whom, and to whom? Is the regime a constitutional democracy, as it maintains, or is it instead a kleptocracy or a fascist police state, as some of its subjects assert? In practice, such disputes frequently loom large in contests over the legitimacy of a regime’s rule, but as Fossen observes much of the extant literature proceeds as if the nature of the regime is settled. Likewise, most contemporary theorists of political legitimacy have little to say about the challenge of attributing specific exercises of power to the regime, yet judging its legitimacy requires that we do so. Finally, conflicting representations of the regime may foreground disagreements over the meaning of basic political concepts. To take one of Fossen’s examples, some may hold that even a highly restricted role for a hereditary monarchy renders a regime undemocratic, and so illegitimate, while others deny the antecedent and therefore also the consequent. The key point does not concern the justifiability of the first-order judgments the parties to this dispute make regarding either democracy or legitimacy, but instead the fact that among the activities that constitute the practice of judging a particular regime’s legitimacy is portraying it in a particular manner.

As a continuous practice of attunement to political reality, judging legitimacy also involves portraying oneself. Who am I in relation to those the regime treats as subjects, and who are we, the regime’s subjects, in relation to the regime (and to other political collectivities)? A judging subject, Fossen writes, ‘ventures to constitute, sustain, or dissolve a collective of such-and-such character, and to characterize individuals as members (or nonmembers) of that collective’ (p. 143). Construing the problem of legitimacy as partly an existential predicament contrasts starkly with most contemporary work in the field. The latter treats subjects as essentially autonomous agents, or members of a particular, historical, political community. To the contrary, Fossen contends that political identity is constructed, and continuously re-constructed, through practical, political, engagement. The same conclusion holds for our portrayal of the regime’s present attempts to govern. Does the criminal prosecution of a presidential candidate evidence partisan persecution or fidelity to the rule of law? To treat a regime’s conduct as (il)legitimate is to represent it in relation to a contestable, and frequently contested, interpretation of that regime’s past and future.

Fossen defends a number of virtues conducive to good political judgment. Whether representing the regime or ourselves we ought to practice humility by recognizing the contestability and fallibility of the assertions we advance within the temporally extended, open-ended, and intersubjective practice that is attunement to political reality. Indeed, we ought to recognize that this is the form that inquiry into political legitimacy takes, and so not frame our interventions as if we have identified the Truth on the basis of an apolitical form of inquiry (i.e. philosophy). We must also strive for both truthfulness and virtuosity when judging the regime’s legitimacy. The former is a matter of accurately representing what the regime is, which depends to a considerable extent on what the regime does. That requires in turn that we interpret the regime’s actions, an activity that requires a degree of creativity that Fossen labels virtuosity. In other words, our theory of the regime must be sensitive to the evidence provided by its conduct, but what we treat as evidence depends on the theory we adopt—with both theory and evidence open to challenge. Finally, when constructing the self, both individual and collective, we should act with integrity, meaning that we should strive to realize in action the individual or collective agent we envision ourselves to be.

While Fossen’s account of the virtues that conduce to judging legitimacy well are insightful, some discussion of what makes these virtues would have been useful. The classical pragmatists, for instance, relied on a notion of progress in human understanding to justify characterizing certain attributes of inquiry as virtues. I am unsure whether Fossen wishes to do the same, or if not, on what basis he proposes to justify the norms for judging legitimacy that he proposes. The argument might also have benefited from a bit more attention to the continuity in judgments that concern the legitimacy of specific exercises of political power and judgments of the standing to exercise political power. Both are the object of judgments of legitimacy, and the path to denying the regime’s standing to rule frequently begins with more limited contestations of specific acts of ruling. Yet these quibbles do not detract from the two invaluable contributions Facing Authority makes to the discussion of political legitimacy: foregrounding and critiquing the metaphysical, epistemological, and semantic presuppositions of nearly all contemporary work on the topic—the position he labels normativism—and providing a nuanced and learned argument for a pragmatist alternative to it.