Institutional facts and principles of global political legitimacy
| Date | 01 June 2016 |
| Author | Terry Macdonald |
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088216630995 |
| Published date | 01 June 2016 |
Journal of International Political Theory
2016, Vol. 12(2) 134 –151
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088216630995
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Institutional facts and
principles of global political
legitimacy
Terry Macdonald
School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia
Abstract
How should the content and justification of action-guiding normative ‘principles’ in
political life be responsive to social ‘facts’? In this article, I answer this question by
sketching a contextualist methodology for identifying and justifying principles for guiding
international institutional action, which is based on an original account of the regulative
role and conceptual structure of principles of political legitimacy. I develop my argument
for this approach in three steps. First, I argue that a special non-utopian category of
normative political principles has the regulatory role of helping solve collective action
problems that emerge in practice among actors engaged in shared institutional projects.
Next, I argue that analysis of such normative political principles can be helpfully framed
by what I call a collective agency conception of political legitimacy. Finally, I draw out the
implications of these claims to show how the content and justification of normative
political principles should vary across institutional contexts, in response to a particular
set of motivational and empirical social facts. This contextualist methodology has useful
applications to international politics insofar it can help to account for the widespread
intuition that standards of political legitimacy for institutions may vary both across
domestic and international levels and among international institutions operating in
different functional domains.
Keywords
Collective action, international institutions, legitimacy, methodology, non-ideal theory,
realism
Corresponding author:
Terry Macdonald, School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Room 420, Level 4,
John Medley (Building 191), Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia.
Email: Terry.macdonald@unimelb.edu.au
630995IPT0010.1177/1755088216630995Journal of International Political TheoryMacdonald
research-article2016
Article
Macdonald 135
Introduction
How should the content and justification of action-guiding normative ‘principles’ in
political life be responsive to social ‘facts’? The importance of this question is evident
nowhere more clearly than within debates about the principled grounds for political sup-
port of international institutions. Theoretical debates about international institutions have
been shaped for the last century by efforts to balance the fact-sensitivity of ‘realpolitik’
traditions with the ‘idealist’ reformism underpinning liberal and other critical alterna-
tives. Analysis of the tension between these realist and idealist approaches is perhaps
most familiar to international relations scholars from the now-classic reflections of E.H.
Carr (2001) on the challenges of building international order through institutions in the
inter-war period of the twentieth century:
All healthy human action, and therefore all healthy thought, must establish a balance between
utopia and reality … The complete realist, unconditionally accepting the causal sequence of
events, deprives himself of the possibility of changing reality. The complete utopian, by
rejecting the causal sequence, deprives himself of the possibility of understanding either the
reality which he is seeking to change or the processes by which it can be changed. The
characteristic vice of the utopian is naivety; of the realist, sterility. (2001: 11–12)
But while Carr’s call for such balanced normative analysis is compelling, it is not
accompanied in his work or any subsequent body of international theory by an expla-
nation of how such balance can be achieved within a given institutional context. What
is required here is a systematic analytic strategy – or methodology – for helping politi-
cal actors identify which political facts should be accommodated by normative politi-
cal principles and how principles should be responsive to these facts within specific
contexts.
Methodological challenges of this general kind have received more sustained atten-
tion within political philosophy than international theory literatures. But within political
philosophy, most methodological debate has centred specifically on the moral justifica-
tion of principles of justice, framed in critical dialogue with John Rawls’ (1999) argu-
ments for the claim that ‘[c]onceptions of justice must be justified by the conditions of
our life as we know it or not at all’ (1999: 398). While principles of justice articulate
fundamental standards for moral critique of international institutions, political collec-
tives are rarely mobilised to support political institutions solely for the pursuit of the goal
of justice (Nagel, 2005). Real political action is motivated by a wider range of values –
which are in turn reflected in the functions and constitutive rules of the real institutions
it sustains. The exclusive appeal to principles of justice as a guide to institutional action
therefore cannot escape Carr’s charge of utopian naivety, since the moral logics of justice
can merely restrain – but never replace – the animating political logics of real institu-
tional action.
A related critique of utopian normative theories has been pressed in recent ‘realist’
literature, which challenges the ‘moralist’ orthodoxy of justice-focused theories (for a
survey, see Rossi and Sleat, 2014). This new realist theory shares with classical interna-
tional relations realists a focus on an analytically distinct ‘political’ sphere of practical
action and normative principle, differentiated from the sphere of morality (Morgenthau,
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