1. In textbooks and other descriptions of legitimacy, it goes without saying that legitimacy concerns government. See, for example, Richard Flathman, “ Legitimacy,” in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, ed. Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 527-33.
2. Robert Dahl, After the Revolution? Authority in a Good Society (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), 60.
3. As Hannah Arendt points out, the term constitution is ambiguous in that it refers both to an act and to its result. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1965), 145. In our case, it can refer to both the act of constituting the people, and the nature or character of this people once constituted. I shall discuss the people in the former sense. This means that whether one thinks of the people as a collective identity, a multitude of individuals, or a plurality of groups is of secondary importance. The focus is on the prior act of demarcation, the separation of one such people from another.
4. Stories of Peoplehood