In person icon Legitimacy, Power, and Inclusion in an Age of Crisis

Abstract

Democracy today faces profound challenges, from the erosion of public trust and the rise of populism to the exclusionary structures embedded within its very foundations. This panel critically reexamines core political concepts—public utility, unreasonableness, public justification, inclusion, and constituent power—arguing that traditional liberal and deliberative frameworks fail to address contemporary political realities. Through feminist, epistemic, emotional, and realist perspectives, the panelists explore how democratic legitimacy is constructed, contested, and maintained. A central theme of this discussion is the exclusionary nature of democratic structures. Public utility, once a guiding principle of the social contract, has been reshaped by neoliberalism into a framework that privileges economic productivity while marginalizing non-masculine and non-human contributions. Similarly, democratic inclusion has historically relied on abstract ethical norms that fail to account for how political communities actually form and sustain themselves. By foregrounding stability and storytelling, a realist approach to inclusion challenges the idealized principles that have traditionally defined the demos. The crisis of legitimacy is further exacerbated by shifts in public reason. Deliberative democratic theory assumes that reasoned debate can mediate political conflict, but contemporary public spheres are increasingly shaped by misinformation and epistemic failures rather than deliberate norm violations. This demands a reassessment of what counts as unreasonableness and how democratic engagement should be structured. Furthermore, theories of public justification have historically centered rational autonomy, neglecting the ways emotions shape moral commitments and political legitimacy. A more nuanced account must recognize emotions as constitutive of political justification rather than as obstacles to reason. Finally, constitutionalism, once seen as a safeguard against authoritarianism, has become a tool of populist regimes that manipulate democratic institutions to consolidate power. This challenges the traditional notion of constituent power as fixed and homogeneous, necessitating a more dynamic understanding of political legitimacy. Together, these papers interrogate the limits of existing democratic frameworks and propose alternative ways of conceptualizing power, legitimacy, and inclusion in an age of democratic uncertainty.

Title	Details
Toward a Realist Principle of Inclusion	View Paper Details
A Constitutional Response to Populism: a New Concept of Constituent Power	View Paper Details
An Intersectional Feminist Critique of Public Utility Based on its Conceptual history	View Paper Details