Legitimizing Authority

Reviews / Votes

"There is no democracy without equality. But is equality at home sustainable without inequalities abroad (or vice versa)? Probing anew the critical importance of equality for legitimating democratic systems, Vormann and Lammert's provocative analysis sheds fresh light on the urgent questions and global challenges facing democracies today. A 'must-read' for those who wish to understand the wellsprings of democratic legitimacy and the prospects of a liberal future."

Ewa Atanassow, author of Tocqueville's Dilemmas and Ours: Sovereignty, Nationalism, Globalization

"In their brilliant analysis, Christian Lammert and Boris Vormann reveal inequality to be the root cause for the crisis of legitimacy in liberal democracies across the globe. With a focus on the history and current state of democracy in the United States of America, the authors persuasively show that equality has been an unkept promise all along. The book provides a sharp analysis and productively discusses possible avenues for repair and redistribution in order to move past the current crisis."

Heike Paul, winner of the 2018 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize and author of The Myths that Made America

"Legitimizing Authority grapples with one of the fundamental contradictions of US state development: That democracy was able to retain legitimacy for many years even though the state consistently failed to implement equality for all. This Janus-faced nature of US political development may already be familiar to readers of American legal and political history; Vormann and Lammert's contribution consists in their magisterial synthesis of political science theories and critique of methodological nationalist approaches to explaining democratic development."

Anna Skarpelis, Inaugural Richard Lachmann Chair of Sociology, CUNY Queens College, USA

"Vormann and Lammert take on a tall and timelier-than-ever order to address challenges of legitimacy, democracy, and equality. The US represents their main case, but for reasons of far-reaching trajectory. It serves as a particularly revealing case about tensions and contradictions between the promise of equality and practices of exploitation, and their interlinkage with the state and political development. The analysis, moreover, is embedded in a rich comparative perspective that draws on an impressive variety of theories and research strands. Finally, it poses difficult questions that societies the world over face in trying to fulfill the promise of equality - by democratic means no less - in a world of growing inequality and looming environmental crisis. This is a fascinating study that will appeal to a large diversity of disciplines and readerships."

Jared Sonnicksen, author of Tensions of American Federal Democracy: Fragmentation of the State