Questionable Grounds (Peter F. The Grounds of Political Legitimacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023)

The manuscript is a review of the monograph The Grounds of Political Legitimacy by Fabienne Peter, the French political philosopher. Following the suit of the modern Anglo-American analytical political philosophy, the author of the monograph offers a metanormative approach to the analysis of legitimacy, focused on identifying the types of obligation on which it can be built. Legitimacy is interpreted in the book as a normative property of a political decision, which makes it binding for both the authorities and citizens. Based on the analysis and synthesis of possible foundations of legitimacy postulated in the existing normative theories, Peter comes to the conclusion that a political decision is made legitimate by the presence of an accessible cognitive authority. At the same time, it can be legitimate in the absence of such authority, if it is backed by the will of the people. According to the reviewer, Peter’s reasoning is purely speculative, and the result is trivial. It remains unclear why such a theory is needed at all, and whether it has any heuristic potential. The facts presented in the study do not speak for themselves. All the empirical material in the article comes down to agitation for Brexit, vaccination during Covid-19, and the Trump administration’s decision on migration. Having considered a number of alternative sociological and politological approaches to the analysis of legitimacy, the reviewer shows that all of them are superior to Peter’s theory in heuristic terms. His general conclusion is that the value of this kind of analytical political philosophy as a methodology for political analysis is questionable, and therefore Peter’s book is hardly of interest to political science.