Abandoned Footnotes

Ian Kershaw's remarkable book  The "Hitler Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich  is a really clever piece of public op...

(Some commentary on recent elections in North Korea, and on electoral rituals generally) As many readers will know, North Korea just had a...

This story of how Mabroka al-Werfalli (lecturer in politics at the University of Benghazi, previously the University of Garyounis) managed t...

Jay Ulfelder kindly points his readers to my (recently updated!) working paper on “ The Irrelevance of Legitimacy ” in a recent post whe...

(This paper has now been published. The official version is available here , and an ungated version can be found here ).   Sorry for the r...

Consider the following passages from David Beetham’s The Legitimation of Power (1991): …it is a notable feature of power relations th...

In the closing pages of Eichmann in Jerusalem , Hannah Arendt notoriously claimed that “politics is not like the nursery; in politics obed...

(As I intimated a while ago, I’ve grown weary of the concept of legitimacy . This is an experiment in thinking about how one might understan...