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Description of  Facing Authority: A Theory of Political Legitimacy

0197645704 epub This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Political protest is often at least partially about the question of legitimacy. How can we distinguish whether a regime is legitimate, or merely purports to be so? In Facing Authority, Thomas Fossen develops a new philosophical approach to political legitimacy, interweaving analyses of key concepts (including representation, identity, and temporality) with examples of real-life struggles for legitimacy, from the German Autumn to the Arab Spring. Instead of asking "what makes authorities legitimate?" in the abstract, Fossen investigates how the question of legitimacy manifests itself in practice.