Legitimate politics is cooperative interdependence among agents with unknowable futures

Evidence

Seen in this way, politics at its best is an intricate field of cooperative agency, linking a multiplicity of free agents, none of whom can know each other’s future actions but all of whom must in some measure rely upon each other’s future actions. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1186

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines legitimate political order as a trust relation requiring reliance on others’ futures despite radical uncertainty — exactly the observable-monitoring problem Hardin/Luhmann frame.
• XREF: The ‘none of whom can know each other’s future actions’ formulation maps almost directly onto Hardin’s trust-as-encapsulated-interest and Luhmann’s familiarity under uncertainty. — connects to: Democratic legitimacy depends on citizens’ internalized commitment that imposed systems cannot replace — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 74; Contracts are collaborative social processes for confronting an unknowable future, not fixed plans. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1051; Event coalitions can achieve political goals while modulating internal difference and inequality — Michelle I. Gawerc, Coalition-building and the forging of…, 323