What Is the Point of Legitimacy?

I discuss three books that, like much contemporary literature on legitimacy, try to break away from the standard obligation-correlative account. The books are Matthias Brinkmann's *An Instrumentalist Theory of Legitimacy*, Fabienne Peter's *The Grounds of Political Legitimacy*, and Thomas Fossen's *Facing Authority*. For all their differences, the three books share a strategy: they try to find a way around some of the most intractable aspects of the problem of legitimacy. They all jettison something or other that, for a long time, had been thought essential to any sound philosophical treatment of legitimacy. They do so resourcefully and impressively, but not without cots. In what follows I attempt a cost-benefit analysis. My tentative contention is that where the books do not succeed, it is because—in different ways and to different degrees—they do not deal head-on with what I take to be the original sin of philosophical approaches to legitimacy: the split from descriptive, sociological approaches. I close with a rough sketch of what we may want to do about that.