Judgment as Timecraft

Abstract

Abstract How do events, like a revolution, a coup, or a contested election, bear on the legitimacy of a regime? This question is addressed by rethinking the relations among legitimacy, judgment, and time. Existing universalist and contextualist theories of legitimacy fail to capture the significance of events because they treat the meaning of events as given to judgment. By contrast, the view proposed here casts the temporality of judgment “in the present progressive,” as responding to and partaking in events. The chapter reconceptualizes political time and clarifies the idea of multiple temporalities. It introduces the notion of timecraft to analyze how multiple timelines intersect and clash in struggles for legitimacy. This is illustrated with reference to the Tahrir Square uprisings in Egypt and a protest against the Dutch monarchy. The chapter closes by reflecting on three virtues of judgment in relation to time: kairos, virtù, and responsiveness.