Legitimacy and Global Governance

The chapter explores the relationship between the concept of legitimacy and institutions which are, ex hypothesis, different from the nation state. One of the longstanding problems in political philosophy is what justifies the duty to obey the law. One of the concerns that many have voiced in recent years is that the answer to the latter question has been modelled on a very specific kind of institution, namely, the state. The chapter interrogates this predicament suggesting that what legitimacy means for a given kind of institution might change if we alter the nature of the institution in question.