Introduction

This chapter presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the sexualisation of political authority in Britain. The inseparability of the question of the legitimacy of political authority from the question of justice in government explains why the trials of same-sex desire analysed in the book speak to the construction of political authority. To the extent that a statesman’s same-sex desire is taken to interfere with good exercise of public powers, it undermines the legitimacy of political authority. And because legitimacy is central to the concept of political authority, so is the disavowal of same-sex desire, either wholesale or qualified. The pluralist’s emphasis on subject-driven law expresses an ethical commitment to valuing the perspective of the other, including mainstream understandings of law. It is this commitment that often animates the sort of post-modernist intellectual projects with which critical legal pluralism has an affinity.