PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Thomas Fossen is Assistant Professor of Political Philosophy at Leiden University, the Netherlands. His research is in political philosophy (or political theory), at the intersection with political science and philosophy of language. His work addresses questions of political legitimacy, political obligation, and political representation. Fossen was previously a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, KU Leuven, and the University of Essex. In 2015, he received a Veni grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). In 2020-2021, he was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a Humboldt Fellow at Goethe University Frankfurt.
Against the move to provide criteria that justify the legitimacy of a regime, Fossen unveils a theory of political judgment that approaches legitimacy as an ongoing, open-ended, and intersubjective practice in which political subjects take a concrete and embodied stance toward a regime and its claim to authority. This book is easily the most compelling and perspicuous contribution to a theory of political judgment I have come across. * Hans Lindahl, Tilburg University and Queen Mary University of London * Probably the first book I've read in years to offer a genuinely new way of looking at fundamental questions in politics. Leaving behind familiar debates between normative theory and realism, Fossen shifts the question from whether legitimacy claims are true to what making them allows political actors to do. Though sharing radical constructivism with Foucault or Arendt, Fossen's post-Hegelian pragmatism provides a framework they don't for sorting through the relationships at stake when struggles over collective political judgment play out in the streets. * Christopher Meckstroth, University of Cambridge * What do we actually do when we judge the legitimacy of a political regime? In Facing Authority Thomas Fossen forcefully challenges the conventional view that judgment is a matter of justification. Drawing creatively on pragmatist philosophy, he shows that judgment is a practical predicament of everyday life. Rigorous, insightful, and timely, Fossen's book offers a powerful new contribution to the theory of political legitimacy. It speaks to anyone concerned with understanding the meaning of legitimacy in our bewildering times. * Sofia Näsström, author of The Spirit of Democracy: Corruption, Disintegration, Renewal * Wholly original and deeply insightful, Facing Authority aims to re-orient debates on political legitimacy away from the articulation of abstract moral criteria towards the investigation of the practical predicament of political agents engaged in judging legitimacy. Fossen's work both establishes a novel agenda for work on political legitimacy and models a valuable new approach to the practice of political philosophy. * David Owen, University of Southampton *
