" This volume contains the Proceedings of the Second Meeting Italian-American Philosophy, that took place in New York from 12 to 15 October 1999, together with two contributions given during the First Meeting. It is the first volume of a Yearbook for Philosophical Hermeneutics, The Dialogue, actually aiming to promote the dialogue between analytic and hermeneutic philosophy. Normativity and legitimacy are the two key concepts which have been at the base of the confrontation between the thought of the Frankfurt School and most of the American philosophy. They can offer the possibility for further discussions and developments within the fields of aesthetics, logic, and language philosophy, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of law and politics. They also represent the ground on which the two different aspects of contemporary philosophy, that one of hermeneutic dealing with historical legitimacy, and the one of analytics dealing with rational determination of norms, could together establish a productive dialogue. "

This volume addresses the normative legitimacy of the international order, asking how we can make sense of legitimacy claims of increasingly diverse global governance institutions and practices and how their legitimacy relates to and differs from state legitimacy. State legitimacy is a central concern of modern political thought but is inadequate when applied to institutions that differ from the state in type, level of governance, scope, and much else. We need a new, tailored approach to the legitimacy of institutions beyond the state, especially international and transnational institutions. Such an approach includes foundational questions: what does it mean for institutions to be legitimate that have radically different purposes, means, interests, capacities, constituents, and roles from states? And what standards do such institutions have to meet in order to count as legitimate? The contributions to this volume seek to advance the debate on these questions at both abstract and more concrete levels. They range from conceptual questions about the nature of legitimacy and international institutions, to rule of law, to the legitimacy of the UN Security Council, the International Criminal Court, and occupying military forces in the face of challenges specific to their nature and context. Together they demonstrate both the promise and challenges of theorizing legitimacy beyond the state. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.

This is Habermas's long awaited work on law, democracy and the modern constitutional state in which he develops his own account of the nature of law and democracy.

This book aims to explore a number of connected themes relating to compliance, legitimacy and trust in different areas of criminal justice and socio-legal regulation.

What makes a government legitimate? Why do people voluntarily comply with laws, even when no one is watching? The idea of political legitimacy captures the fact that people obey when they think governments' actions accord with valid principles. For some, what matters most is the government's performance on security and the economy. For others, only a government that follows democratic principles can be legitimate. Political legitimacy is therefore a two-sided reality that scholars studying the acceptance of governments need to take into account. The diversity and backgrounds of East Asian nations provides a particular challenge when trying to determine the level of political legitimacy of individual governments. This book brings together both political philosophers and political scientists to examine the distinctive forms of political legitimacy that exist in contemporary East Asia. It is essential reading for all academic researchers of East Asian government, politics and comparative politics.

At an unsettled time for liberal democracy, with global eruptions of authoritarian and arbitrary rule, here is one of the first full-fledged philosophical accounts of what makes governments legitimate. What makes a government legitimate? The dominant view is that public officials have the right to rule us, even if they are unfair or unfit, as long as they gain power through procedures traceable to the consent of the governed. In this rigorous and timely study, Arthur Isak Applbaum argues that adherence to procedure is not enough: even a properly chosen government does not rule legitimately if it fails to protect basic rights, to treat its citizens as political equals, or to act coherently. How are we to reconcile every person’s entitlement to freedom with the necessity of coercive law? Applbaum’s answer is that a government legitimately governs its citizens only if the government is a free group agent constituted by free citizens. To be a such a group agent, a government must uphold three principles. The liberty principle, requiring that the basic rights of citizens be secured, is necessary to protect against inhumanity, a tyranny in practice. The equality principle, requiring that citizens have equal say in selecting who governs, is necessary to protect against despotism, a tyranny in title. The agency principle, requiring that a government’s actions reflect its decisions and its decisions reflect its reasons, is necessary to protect against wantonism, a tyranny of unreason. Today, Applbaum writes, the greatest threat to the established democracies is neither inhumanity nor despotism but wantonism, the domination of citizens by incoherent, inconstant, and incontinent rulers. A government that cannot govern itself cannot legitimately govern others.

The question about the relation between legality and political legitimacy is both one of the basic questions of modern legal and political philosophy and one of the most important problems in theoretical sociology. This volume brings together the work of a number of internationally prominent legal theorists, political theorists, sociologists, historians and philosophers, all of whom have worked extensively on the conceptual analysis of law and power, in order to address and illuminate this central question of the social sciences. The primary objective of the book is to propose and elaborate paradigms that traverse conventional disciplinary boundaries, and to combine sociological and normative/deductive patterns of analysis in order both to capture the legitimatory foundations of modern societies and accurately to account for the transformation of the classical foundations of political legitimacy in recent decades. All chapters in the volume propose new and challenging paradigms for analyzing the legal sources of legitimate power both in the historical formation of modern societies and in the present. .