Emotional Sovereignty: The Affective Ground That Legitimacy Theories Presuppose

This article advances a meta-foundational claim about political legitimacy: legitimate authority requires non-coerced and non-deceptive affective uptake by those subject to it. Procedures, public reasons, recognition practices, and service-based accounts of authority may be formally valid, morally attractive, or instrumentally effective, but they cannot generate legitimate authority unless those addressed can take that authority up as part of their political world rather than as an alien, humiliating, unsafe, or externally imposed order. I call this requirement the Affective Uptake Condition (AUC). The article makes five contributions. First, it identifies the affective presupposition beneath proceduralist, deliberative, recognition-based, and service-based accounts of legitimate authority. Second, it explains why uptake is affective rather than reducible to reflective endorsement: reflective principles can justify kinds of authority, but they do not by themselves explain how this authority becomes ours. Third, it formalizes AUC through two axioms, three enabling dimensions—dignity, belonging, and safety—and a revisability condition distinguishing uptake from capture. Fourth, it treats Rawls, Habermas, Raz, Honneth, Fraser, and Nussbaum as diagnostic sites rather than survey objects. Fifth, it develops the political ‘we’ and five diagnostic tests for analyzing state formation, persistence, collapse, re-emergence, and manipulation.