Published: 2025-08-19
Legitimacy is like a codebase - it seldom reveals itself until it fails. Its authority is presumed in operation, questioned in duress, and reconstituted in the name of reform. What recent discussions have exposed, across fields as diverse as political theory and logistical praxis, is that failures reveal invariants that silently authorised what is routine. The task is to refactor: rewriting legitimacy to adapt to the paradigmatic present.
Such an undertaking is hardly an abstraction. Legitimacy is often induced under conditions of asymmetry. Case studies, whether drawn from colonial encounters, codas from the chain-of-command, or the residual incomes of infrastructural blocs, demonstrate shared syntax: systems leveraged yet routinised by improvisation.
Postcolonial critique and system architecture converge in this domain. Duncan Ivison's insistence that liberal orders reproduce colonial injustices mirrors an engineer's understanding of a codebase embedding its historical artifacts. Audra Simpson's refusal resonates with the exit clause of modular design; the base case. A sub-routine must return, 'null', at the very least; a room must have an exit which may also serve as its entrance.
Meanwhile, Forst's right to justification parallels the invariants that restrict admissible variations. Yet, each author claims to be in complement, when presenting legitimacy, like architecture, as dependent on the protocols that dictate its form. This, as prior publications have foreshadowed, is not error to perform, but conformity as function. A database schema constraints the queries it can entertain; legitimacy constraints the claims it can process.
Today, dominance seldom presents a whip; it stares at comma-separated values. A decimal misplaced may very well deny someone's disability benefits. In this sense, legitimacy is refactored not only in constitutional recompositions but also punctuations. For Pateman, the social contract is always gendered; for Mills, raced. The social contract has always been about grammar.
Forst, Rainer. The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
Ivison, Duncan. “Pluralising Political Legitimacy.” Postcolonial Studies 20, no. 1 (2017): 118–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2017.1334289.
Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988.
Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.