Research agenda
I work in political theory on the structural foundations of liberal legitimacy. My current project argues that procedural liberalism presupposes the capacities for agency it fails to theorise or guarantee, producing a vulnerability I call the legitimacy gap — a disconnect between a liberal polity's capacity for justification and its capacity for recognition.
Proposed doctoral research — Liberalism as Orientation
Under genuine pluralism, no group constitutes a majority, and the procedural state addresses everyone in general and no one in particular; every citizen experiences the political order as designed for someone else. Illiberal movements exploit this gap by offering what proceduralism structurally cannot: recognition, belonging, and a sense that the political order is for someone in particular. The project develops orientational liberalism as a constructive response — a redesign of liberal theory that grounds legitimacy in the state's duty to secure the conditions of agency, occupying a third position between perfectionism and proceduralism. It introduces a structural distinction between dependent and independent capability, grounded in universal human needs, and reconceptualises the welfare state as the institutional expression of a shared commitment to human development.
Key questions
Approach & methods
Genealogical reconstruction of the contractualist tradition (Grotius, Hobbes, Rousseau, Rawls); conceptual analysis drawing on the Capability Approach (Sen, Nussbaum) and ontological security (Giddens); critical engagement with contemporary defences and diagnoses of liberalism (Sunstein, Lefebvre, Moyn, Fukuyama, Acemoglu & Robinson); comparative analysis of illiberal movements as responses to the legitimacy gap.
Selected references
Rawls, Political Liberalism (1993); Sen, Development as Freedom (1999); Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (2000); Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (1991); Foisneau, Hobbes: La vie inquiète (2016); Sunstein, On Liberalism (2025); Moyn, Liberalism Against Itself (2023); Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents (2022).