Democratic Legitimacy and the Reasoned Will of the People

Abstract

The modern democratic state is a coercive legal apparatus meant to order and regulate a number of important societal activities, for the purpose of securing or advancing some notion of the general will or good of the people. There are a number of competing justificatory accounts of the state's authority to coerce. Here I will discuss and defend a deliberative account. Deliberative accounts draw on the liberal tradition's emphasis on the natural freedom of individuals, and, in particular, on the idea that the state's ultimate authority derives only from the reasoned judgment of the people. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)