ABSTRACT
Introduction I have been attempting to explain the significance of legitimacy in modern political theory. My thesis is that our conceptions of the person and the political embody the remainders of a deep worry over the precarious nature of legitimacy, and thus the fragility of politics and community. As I have said, liberalism is a theoretical tradition that has sought to dispense with anxiety over the politics of legitimacy by repressing the historical and constricting the political. Liberalism activates a forgetting of the original frailty of all politics; it does so by chasing persistent doubt away from collective memory off into regions of the sub/unconscious where it presents little threat to convention. A politics that emerges in the form of contemporary liberal doctrines is thus simultaneously imbued with this anxiety and gains legitimation through the very practices of articulating the illusion of a foundationless presence required of it.
