The paper explores the understanding of legitimacy in political theory, highlighting its realist influences.
The past two decades have seen a resurgence of debates about how to understand legitimacy in political theory.One of the reasons for this resurgence has been the recent realist turn, with its call to pay more attention to questions of (authorized) power rather than to principles of justice (Sleat, 2015).Such a realist perspective has led theorists to shed new light on many facets of legitimacy, for example the relationship between legitimation and the establishment of politics (Cozzaglio & Greene,
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Prinz et al. (2026) studied this question.
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