The Body That Cannot Abdicate: Political Legitimacy and the Governance of a Good No Power Has Previously Had to Govern

Every institution designed to limit political power has relied, without needing to say so, on one fact that made no other guarantee necessary: that whoever held power would eventually die, and power would pass to someone else. This essay examines what happens to that reliance once a technology begins to make the timing of death itself unevenly negotiable. It shows why the officials most directly responsible for governing access to such a technology cannot straightforwardly be trusted to decide the question themselves, drawing on an influential account of what makes governance legitimate rather than merely effective and on an independent literature concerned with goods no democratic procedure has ever allocated cleanly. It then asks why an outright prohibition, however well-intentioned, asks something of its own authors that a substantial body of evidence on human motivation suggests very few people can sustain. The essay turns next to the historical mechanism that has, until now, corrected every previous form of entrenched advantage — the ordinary fact of biological succession — and asks what happens to a succession of political, philosophical, and sociological traditions that quietly assumed this mechanism would keep working. A further section examines why visible, partial access to such a technology is likely to intensify rather than relieve the political pressure surrounding it, and why the historical exits available to a symbolic target of that pressure are not available here. The essay closes by examining the earliest governance bodies actually forming around this problem, the reasons a political movement that successfully reforms them is not obviously protected from reproducing the very problem it set out to solve, and a final, purely structural obstacle facing any effort to govern a target that will not hold still.