The Dialectic of Affective Legitimacy: Emotion, Reason, and Institutional Survival

This paper offers a conceptual genealogy of affect in Western political thought and an intervention into the contemporary legitimacy crisis. We argue that the rise of “felt truths,” claims grounded in lived experience and affective judgment rather than in rational consensus, does not mark a break from reason but its affective culmination. Drawing on figures such as Plato, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, we show that political legitimacy has been inextricably linked to affect, even when it is disavowed. We introduce the concept of affective elasticity to describe the institutional capacity to absorb, hold, and translate emotional claims into politically meaningful forms of legitimacy. In an era increasingly shaped by what is felt to be true, we argue that democratic institutions must develop affective capacities not as rhetorical sentiment but as a condition of survival, while remaining oriented by justice, recognition, and non-domination. We advance a historical–philosophical reconstruction and a normative framework for understanding how legitimacy is constituted, sustained, and fractured through affect.