Second Personal Politics and Political Authenticity

Research

Second Personal Politics and Political Authenticity

Abstract

 

 

Authenticity is widely invoked as a central force in modern politics. Yet contemporary philosophical accounts usually portray authenticity as a distinctly individualistic ideal, arising from a Romantic view of the self. The puzzle arises, I argue, because modern discussions have overlooked an older, explicitly political conception of authenticity. Drawing on Plato’s Alcibiades I, I develop an account of authenticity—understood as taking an active role in shaping one’s self and expressing that self in what one does—as something that is both the product of, and necessary for, certain kinds of second-personal political engagement: in virtue of proactive support from our community, we become authentic, and in virtue of being authentic, we become able to participate fully in political life. 

Keywords:

  • Keyword: Authenticity
  • Keyword: Second-personal reasons
  • Keyword: Activism
  • Keyword: Leadership

How to Cite:

Mortimer, S. A., (2026) “Second Personal Politics and Political Authenticity”, Political Philosophy 3(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/pp.28060

Downloads
Download PDF
Download XML

Funding

Name
JSPS KAKENHI
Funding ID
JP26K00371
Name
Kyoto Institute of Philosophy

Second-Personal Politics and Political Authenticity

Samuel A. Mortimer

Philosophy & Management, Kyoto University, Japan

This above all: to thine own self be true

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

                                                  – William Shakespeare1

In recent years, philosophers have begun to coalesce on a particular story about authenticity. According to this story, authenticity is a value that is distinctive to modernity;2 it developed out of a Romantic, individualist view of the self that understood the individual as separate from and perhaps even opposed to its social environment. Authenticity has now become “one of the constitutive ideals of modern culture,”3 “a central tenet” of how “a member of an affluent, contemporary Western culture” would think about important life choices.4 As an ethical ideal, the demand for authenticity—to take an active role in shaping the self we become, and to express that self in what we do5—has been both praised and blamed for the individualism of many modern societies: at best, “a dream of an ideal community in which individuality will not be subsumed and sacrificed, but fully developed and expressed;”6 at worst, a self-absorption that “both flattens and narrows our lives, makes them poorer in meaning, and less concerned with others or society.”7

Against this backdrop, it is perhaps surprising that the demand for authenticity seems to play such an important role in modern politics. For a purportedly individualistic, self-centered ideal, its impact in the social realm is profound. In a variety of countries—not only affluent Western countries, but also countries with very different cultural inheritances, from India and the Philippines to Brazil and Ukraine8—people seek authenticity in their political leaders and elected representatives, and they criticize and censure individuals or organizations for apparently inauthentic political activism.

One may wonder if the sense of “authenticity” is the same in both contexts. In everyday discourse, the term “authenticity” can be used in a variety of ways. Accordingly, some philosophers have understood the demand for authenticity in politics as merely a demand for transparency or honesty;9 others as a demand for consistency, such that an authentic politician is one who consistently upholds and expresses her core commitments;10 others as analogous to authenticity in the context of art, as true membership of a certain class or group (i.e., that a leader is “authentically” a member of “the people” as opposed to “the elite”). Nonetheless, many of the paradigmatic examples of “authentic” political leaders are known neither for their honesty, nor their consistency, nor their non-elite backgrounds, even among their supporters.11 Donald Trump is an obvious example—as a compulsively dishonest scion of an elite family, with ever-shifting political commitments—though he is far from alone in this regard.12 Undoubtedly, there are many for whom the appeal of such individuals lies in the perception that they are “true to themselves.”13 If so, why should this kind of authenticity—that apparently most individualistic of values—be seen as a virtue, indeed a core virtue, of political actors?14

I would like to suggest that an earlier tradition of thought about authenticity captures a political side of authenticity that has been lost in modern treatments of the topic. My source for this claim is the Platonic dialogue Alcibiades I, which features Socrates in conversation with the youth Alcibiades. Alcibiades is preparing to enter politics, but Socrates does not think he is ready. Through their dialogue, Alcibiades comes to understand that before going into politics, he must first seek both to know himself and to take an active role in developing himself into the kind of person who is suitable for going into politics. Then, and only then, should he apply the skills and understanding he has developed in the political sphere. The term “authenticity” is not used in the dialogue, and yet Socrates’ demand of Alcibiades (that he take an active role in shaping the self he becomes and express that self in what he does) precisely fits what many philosophers now label with that term. The lesson is that Alcibiades must become authentic if he is to participate in political life—but this is not something he can do alone: Socrates is both the initiator of Alcibiades’ project of self-improvement and, as his mentor, necessary for its success. The dialogue Alcibiades I thus presents authenticity as something that is both social and political.

My aim in this article is to defend the political conception of authenticity implicit in Alcibiades I. I will argue that authenticity is a collective (political) project and the collective is the beneficiary: in virtue of proactive support from our community, we become authentic, and in virtue of becoming authentic, we become able to participate fully in political life. Central to my argument is a distinction between two forms of political engagement. Some forms of engagement are what I call “second-personal:” they concern the claims, demands, and entreaties that people make of others, such as in demonstrations or political speech. Other forms of engagement are “third-personal;” they concern merely the transfer of information between political decision-makers and their subjects, or the exercise of influence from one to the other. Second-personal political engagement, I will argue, is a ubiquitous and important part of political life. It both explains and legitimizes certain political decisions, and it is also a central aspect of political and organizational leadership. My contention is that authenticity plays an important role in justifying these practices.

The rest of this article will have four sections. In the first section, I will discuss why the authenticity of individuals requires the proactive involvement of others. In the second section, I will introduce and defend the distinction between third-personal and second-personal forms of political engagement. In the third, I will draw on Darwall’s account of second-personal reasons15 to explain why it is only if one is authentic that one has the standing, accountability, and answerability needed for second-personal political engagement. In the fourth, I will conclude.

I. BECOMING AUTHENTIC

How does one become authentic? At first glance, authenticity’s emphasis on self-creation and self-expression suggests that this is primarily an individual affair.16 For example, Paul elaborates the ideal of authenticity as follows: “You are expected to take charge of your own destiny. You chart your future, deliberating and reflecting on who you really are and what you really want from life. … You live an authentic life by faithfully modeling your preferences, and you live a rational life by matching your choices to these preferences. Rational authenticity, then, is hewing as close as you can to the kind of life that best realizes your dreams, hopes, and aspirations.”17 On views like this, authenticity is not only a purely individual exercise but also something where the individual is the primary beneficiary. People should be authentic, on such views, because authenticity is important for living a good life.

Nonetheless, even those committed to individualist views of authenticity like these can accept that others play a significant role in making us authentic. Take the idea that being authentic requires taking charge of one’s destiny. This relies on us having the autonomy to make and act on big life decisions. Westlund argues that autonomy “is not only compatible with human embeddedness in social and personal relationships, but in some important respects depends on these relationships.”18 No matter how capable we are, we so often rely on the help of others as we seek to navigate life. To apply to college, we rely on the many people who engage in college admissions and maintain the digital application systems; to move to a new location, we rely on transport systems and public infrastructure; to think through major life decisions, we rely on friends and mentors as sounding boards and sources of wisdom. And we are also reliant on others in a more fundamental way. Taylor argues that “[w]e become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining an identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.”19 We make sense of ourselves and shape ourselves using the linguistic tools developed by other people. And so even the individual work of taking control of our lives and expressing our self in our actions is, in a sense, social—something that we cannot accomplish alone.

At times, Taylor seems to suggest that authenticity is social in a deeper sense—not merely something where we rely on others as we pursue it, but something we co-produce with others. Taylor writes, “[w]e define [our identity] always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the identities our significant others want to recognize in us. And even when we outgrow some of the latter—our parents, for instance—and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.”20 On this view, authenticity is not merely social but second-personal: rather than an individual constructing their identity by the merely third-personal process of picking labels from the socially constructed linguistic toolbox of their language, the individual constructs their identity as an “I” making claims on, and responding to, a “you.”

That said, Taylor’s emphasis is still on the individual working things out, even if in dialogue with others. It is not a project that others play a proactive role in, nor a project that they can expect to benefit from. But the notion of authenticity in Alcibiades I is different. As the young Alcibiades pursues self-understanding and self-improvement in dialogue with Socrates, this process is nonetheless something in which Socrates takes the lead—both in suggesting and in guiding. While the task of self-shaping is Alcibiades’ own, Alcibiades nonetheless comes to realize that he cannot accomplish it by himself, but must rely on Socrates, as someone who loves him for his own sake, to lead him. The dialogical aspect of this self-shaping, as something done by Alcibiades but led by Socrates, is repeatedly emphasized, e.g., in the following exchange:

“SOCRATES: Wasn’t I asking and weren’t you answering?

ALCIBIADES: Yes.

SOCRATES: Who do you think is saying these things—me, the questioner, or you, the answerer?

ALCIBIADES: I am.”21

The reasoning Alcibiades engages in and the conclusions that he draws are his own, and yet it is only through Socrates’ questioning that he can engage in this process of self-improvement—indeed, only through Socrates’ intervention that he realizes he has to do so.22

This is close to Taylor’s view, but it goes further than Taylor and other recent authors23 in how it accounts for the social aspect of authenticity. These authors recognize that we cannot do the internal work of identity development without relying on others. But their views do not rule out the possibility, and in some cases specifically endorse the idea, that we should nonetheless take the lead in our own identity-defining dialogues, that we should know when to investigate, with whom, and how. Indeed, one might assume that authenticity’s demand for us to self-shape and self-express is itself a demand for us to lead the dialogical process of developing our own authenticity—for us to “take charge” of our own destiny, as Paul puts it.24 By contrast, Plato’s dialogue suggests that we may also not know when and where to start, nor how to proceed, in this process without the help of others. Alcibiades does not know what he is missing in himself, nor how to find it. It is only through Socrates’ questioning that Alcibiades comes to understand what he does not know and how to go about improving himself. For Alcibiades to become authentic, Socrates has to take an active, indeed proactive, role.

The idea that we need to rely on others to develop the self-understanding necessary for living authentically is not a point that, I think, many scholars of authenticity would dispute. If we accept that other people play an important role in helping us understand ourselves (a point which has been developed by many philosophers, most notably Aristotle), and if living authentically involves expressing who we are in what we do, then it is not much of a jump to argue that other people are similarly important for helping us live authentically. What I take to be distinctive about Alcibiades I is that it takes this idea to its logical conclusion regarding the role others need to play. Alcibiades knows what he wants to become, but he does not realize how far away his current self is from this ideal. He does not understand what he is lacking and what qualities he needs to develop to get there. Because of this, he does not realize the work he has to do to become authentic, let alone where to begin in doing that work. In the language of the earlier quote from Paul, he lacks knowledge of how to pursue “the kind of life that best realizes [his] dreams, hopes, and aspirations,” nor is he yet in a position to learn this through “deliberating and reflecting on who [he] really [is] and what [he] really want[s] from life.”25 It is because of this that Socrates’ intervention is needed: Socrates, who knows Alcibiades deeply, initiates Alcibiades’ self-reflections; he takes the lead in helping Alcibiades learn about himself, and guides Alcibiades through this process of self-understanding-to-self-transformation. Socrates is in a position to know how Alcibiades should go about this process; Alcibiades, whose lack of self-understanding blinds himself precisely to this selfsame deficiency, is not.

Let’s take a step back. What I have written suggests that the development of authenticity, if it is worth developing at all, should be seen as a political matter, in a broad sense of the term. On the one hand, it falls to the community to create the conditions under which the pursuit of authenticity is possible, by providing tools and institutions and removing impediments such that people have the autonomy to take an active role in shaping who they become. On the other, it falls to all of us to engage proactively in the second-personal work of helping others become authentic, by coming to know the people in our community and helping them understand and shape themselves. Authenticity is not something that can be left up to the individual. Rather, it is a collective project—something we must work toward together, proactively, as a community. It is in this sense that I think the development of authenticity should be seen as a political, rather than merely social, matter.

This raises the question of why the rest of us should care about other people’s authenticity. Why should we make our neighbors’ authenticity our project too, rather than leaving it up to them? Of course, if authenticity is important for human flourishing, then we have other-centered reasons to help those around us become authentic. Nonetheless, I think that something of the importance of authenticity is lost if we see it simply as a matter of benefit to individuals—something we may want to inculcate in ourselves or our loved ones, but not something of any wider social significance. In the next section, I will instead take up and argue for Socrates’ claim that the authenticity of individuals plays an important role in qualifying them for political life.26

II. SECOND-PERSONAL POLITICS

My aim in this section is to argue that authenticity plays an important role in political life, as the condition for an important and widespread kind of political activity. To make this argument, I will draw a distinction between two kinds of political engagement. By political engagement I mean the different ways that actors seek to shape their political reality—the laws or policies of their country, the treatment of certain social groups, political institutions and conventions, or the character and behavior of their communities. Examples of political engagement may include lobbying, demonstrations, boycotts, political speech, etc. Political engagement may occur in a variety of contexts: paradigmatically the state, but also communities, private organizations, political parties, and more.

The distinction I want to draw is between third-personal and second-personal political engagement. Very roughly, the distinction is as follows. Second-personal engagement concerns political engagement wherein some people make demands on others. For example, participants in a demonstration may bring a list of demands to the government; activists may make demands of corporate leaders; corporate leaders make demands of their employees. This kind of engagement is second-personal because it involves the engagement of an “I” (or “we”) to a “you”—I demand that you do something, or I ask for your assistance.

Third-personal political engagement equally seeks to influence political reality, but not by making demands. Sometimes this concerns the transfer of information, such as when policymakers conduct studies or surveys of their constituents to understand their constituents’ interests, needs, and preferences (or equally when a group engages in a protest with the aim of letting policymakers know their beliefs or strength of feeling about something). Other times this concerns efforts to shape the behavior of political actors through impersonal means—from behavioral nudges to terrorism. What unites both kinds of activity is that the salient distinction is between an “I” (or “we”) and a “them:” I communicate this information to them, or I make them act.

Perhaps the simplest way to draw out the character of third-personal engagement is to discuss some of the ways that political philosophers have talked about democratic representation. In some of these theories of representation, constituents’ beliefs and circumstances matter third-personally: they can be measured and taken into account without any second-personal involvement by the constituents themselves. Anticipatory representation, for example, is concerned with predictions about the future behavior of constituents, while substantive representation is concerned with the interests of constituents;27 while the best way to learn what that behavior will be, or what those interests are, might be to ask the constituents, it equally may not be. Things like interests, behavior, preferences, etc. are third-personal things—at least in principle, we may be able to learn about them without asking the people who have them. Indeed, as we have already seen, people are often not the best judges of their own interests, preferences, and future behavior.

By contrast, critical approaches to political philosophy often take a second-personal approach. For example, McAfee and Howard write that feminist democratic theory “takes democracy to be an ongoing and unfinished project with any outcome open to further contestation” that seeks “to imagine and try to create a better world by anticipating, claiming, and appealing to others that it should be so.”28 Underlying these claims is a vision of political engagement that involves second-personal engagement between people—appeals to others, contestation between actors, holding each other accountable, standing in solidarity. There is still an attempt to change the behavior of other participants in society, but it is an attempt to do so personally: appealing to them as people, as one person to another, rather than manipulating them to act as we think they should.

Second-personal political engagement also matters for leadership, both political leadership and corporate leadership. By “leadership” here, I am referring not to the formal position wherein someone has authority to direct others (e.g., as a commander in an army unit or a manager in a team), but rather to the quality of leadership, in the sense we use the term when we say that someone has shown leadership. Someone can show leadership whether or not they occupy the formal position of being a leader. Both leadership-as-position and leadership-as-quality have a second-personal dimension: someone in a leadership position exercises authority by issuing commands and directives to her subordinates, who have a reason to fall in line that “derives entirely from her authority to address demands to them and their responsibility to comply.”29 But leaders do more than just issue orders. In many cases, a leader seeks (and is expected) to inspire her followers, to entreat them to pursue some goal or to change their behavior. This is a form of political engagement: it is an attempt by the leader to shape her political reality, and especially the character and behavior of her community. It is also second-personal: it addresses her followers as autonomous agents, as people to whom the leader stands in a position of mutual accountability. Second-personal political engagement thus comprises an important part of what it is to show leadership—whether in the public or private sphere, and whether by a formal leader or not.

I suspect the kinds of second-personal political engagement I have discussed will be familiar to many. My aim here is not to justify such activity: it is such a widespread form of political engagement, adopted by people with all sorts of political commitments in all sorts of times and places, that one might reasonably presume it has a valuable role to play in political life—indeed, it is hard to imagine political life without it. I should also note that, in practice, second-personal and third-personal political engagement often overlap: for example, a protest might seek both to make demands on the government and also to communicate to the public the circumstances faced by some group.

But let me nonetheless give a partial account of why second-personal engagement matters, since that will be important for showing later why authenticity matters for second-personal engagement.

I will start by noting that people (whether political decision-makers or their subjects) regularly act in response to second-personal political engagement. Why do they do so? Sometimes it may be simply for third-personal reasons—a protest may demonstrate that the public support for a policy is so low that pursuing it would lead to the collapse of the government, for example. But often, when political decision-makers bend to public outrage etc., that is a response to a second-personal demand. They are acting precisely because a certain group demanded that of them. A government may pass legislation that significantly improves the lives of a minority group in response to activist demands, for example, even if the political power of that group to force change is negligible.

Why should people care about such second-personal demands? Darwall has given an influential defense of the idea that there are distinctly second-personal reasons, to which some second-personal demands give rise. Not all reasons are second-personal: Darwall writes, “[t]hat [something] can cause discomfort, embarrassment, pain, inconvenience, or even suffering and injury are reasons to [avoid doing that thing], whether or not anyone has any authority to claim this of us or hold us answerable.”30 But there is also an important class of reasons which are second-personal, and which are closely connected with moral notions like blame, accountability, and guilt. Darwall writes, “[h]aving the authority to demand that others [do something] entails their being accountable to you for doing so, the legitimacy of your demand, and the existence of a second-personal reason for others to comply.”31 It is these second-personal reasons that the demands of second-personal political engagement concern, if, that is, the demands are legitimate.

This suggests that second-personal demands play a role in political life for the same reason they matter in everyday interpersonal contexts: people have the authority to make demands in certain cases, and in those cases, there is a distinctive kind of reason for others to comply. If they face a legitimate demand, then they are accountable to those who are making the demand; if they fail to comply, those who made the demand are equally entitled to feel reactive attitudes like resentment or indignation.

III. WHY AUTHENTICITY MATTERS FOR SECOND-PERSONAL POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT

The preceding discussion raises the question of when and how people should respond to the demands made of them in the context of second-personal political engagement. To answer this question, I will start by drawing a parallel with an argument made by Strawson in his influential discussion of determinism and moral responsibility.32 Strawson argues that there are two different perspectives one can take toward explaining the behavior of others: we can see them merely as part of the natural world, a product of prior causes and shaped by their environment (the “objective” standpoint). Or we can see them as an agent who is responsible for their own behavior (the “participant” standpoint). Only if we take the participant standpoint is it fitting for us to feel reactive attitudes, like resentment or gratitude, toward them; much as it is not fitting to feel resentment toward the rain for making us wet, it is not fitting to feel reactive attitudes toward something we see merely as a feature of the natural world, a causal product of its circumstances. Strawson argues that the participant standpoint is so thoroughly a part of ordinary human moral practices that it is “practically inconceivable” to abandon it in general. Rather, the question we face is when to abandon it in particular cases. In the everyday interpersonal context, the kinds of cases where we do abandon the participant standpoint in favor of the objective standpoint are either cases where someone lacks relevant capacities (for instance, a small child or someone suffering from a serious mental illness), or cases where they have some kind of excuse for their behavior (for instance, they knocked into me because someone pushed them).

Similar considerations apply in the political context as well. Suppose we are political decision-makers on whom some group has made a second-personal demand. We can adopt a participant standpoint toward them, taking their demands on us—if legitimate—to create a second-personal reason for us to act. Or we can take an objective, third-personal standpoint: we can consider whether they are providing any new information to us that we should have been considering anyway, and we can consider how much power they have to affect things (how important it is, pragmatically, to bend to their demands); if they are not very powerful, and if we already knew and understood their demands, then their political action will not provide any new reasons to act—unlike if we took a participant standpoint, where we would take their political action as (potentially) providing new second-personal reasons to act.

It is at this point that we re-encounter the notion of authenticity. Above, I wrote that someone is authentic if they both take an active role in shaping the self they become and express that self in what they do. Let me now be more precise. In earlier work, I have drawn a distinction between the notions of authentic self and authentic agency.33 People shape who they become through their choices and imaginative activity; if they do so in a way that reflects their authentic self—the self they have shaped in this way—then they are exercising authentic agency. There is thus a reciprocal, ongoing relationship of dependence between authentic self and authentic agency. Even for someone with an authentic self, acting in a way that does not reflect that self means that they are not being authentic. The upshot of this is that when authentic people act—when, in other words, an authentic self exercises authentic agency—their self is deeply bound up in the action they do. Not only do they stand behind the action as an authentic expression of their self, but they also stand behind the self that the action expresses.

It is only if someone is authentic in this way, I will argue, that their second-personal political engagement can generate second-personal reasons for others to act.34 When authentic people demonstrate against a government policy, the government may have second-personal reasons to act; when inauthentic people demonstrate, the government does not. When authentic leaders make demands on their followers, their followers may have second-personal reasons to act; when inauthentic leaders make demands on their followers, their followers do not. Authenticity—the authentic expression of an authentic self—is a condition for second-personal political engagement to generate the kind of second-personal reasons at which such engagement aims. In that sense, authenticity underlies second-personal political engagement.35

I will argue for this claim by identifying three conditions for second-personal political engagement to generate second-personal reasons—standing, accountability, and answerability—and showing that each requires that the agent is authentic.

A. Standing

Let me start by discussing standing. Standing is a notion that occurs in various areas of philosophy and law; the basic idea is that there are eligibility conditions for making certain kinds of claims on others. For example, a common idea in law is that a plaintiff only has the standing to engage in litigation if they have suffered an injury from the conduct complained of;36 if A injures B, unconnected bystander C does not have the standing to sue A.37

In the case of second-personal political engagement, there must be something that makes it appropriate for it to be me who makes the demand. To make a second-personal demand is to stake out some personal claim on the reason a decision-maker acts. But to engage in second-personal political activity, one presumably does not have to be personally affected by the matter one is engaging about: people protest in solidarity with others, allies engage in advocacy, etc. This raises the question of how someone—I will term them an “activist” for the purposes of argument, though the point applies equally to political leaders making second-personal demands of their constituents, or corporate leaders making second-personal demands of their employees—can develop the right kind of personal stake in some matter.

For an activist to stake out a personal claim on the reason a decision-maker acts, their self must in some way be connected with the demand they are making. If there is such a connection, then for a political decision-maker to fail to act on their demand is not just an affront to something the activist cares about, but an affront to the activist themself. Darwall writes: “when second-personal reasons are proffered, issues of respect are invariably at stake. If the private fails to heed the sergeant’s orders, he doesn’t simply act contrary to a reason that sheds favorable light; he violates the order and so disrespects the sergeant and her authority. If your foot-treader fails to respond to your demand, he fails also to meet your legitimate expectation and so disrespects your standing to make the claim and, therefore, you.”38 If there is not such a connection, by contrast, there is no personal affront to the activist if the decision-maker ignores the demand. The activist will of course be disappointed, but they have not been disrespected by the decision-maker.

What I want to claim is that one connects oneself to some political project precisely by being authentic. An authentic person, as we saw above, is someone who takes an active role in shaping who they become and expresses that self in how they act. People can structure their lives around certain projects, making commitments and decisions that place that project at the center of who they are. In the process of doing so, they make that project part of their “authentic self”—the part of themselves that is the product of the exercise of authentic self-control over who they are.39 For them to engage in second-personal political activity, like protests or activism, that expresses their project is thus precisely to express their authentic self in their actions. When an authentic person engages authentically in second-personal political activity, their self is thus wrapped up in the demands they make; this is why for political decision-makers to deny legitimate demands by authentic activists is an affront to the activists themselves—and this is why authentic activists have, in Darwall’s words, “the authority to make a claim on or demand or expect something of” political decision-makers.40

B. Accountability

A second condition for second-personal political engagement to generate second-personal reasons, I will argue, is accountability. According to Shoemaker, to be accountable “is to be susceptible to being held to account if one flouts relationship-defining demands,” where to hold someone to account is “to sanction that person, whether it be via the expression of a reactive attitude, public shaming, or something more psychologically or physically damaging.”41 Part-and-parcel of making a legitimate demand on someone, Darwall argues, is being eligible to hold them to account if they do not act on that demand.42 So accountability matters for second-personal political engagement in part because one can hold political decision-makers to account if they fail to fulfill one’s demands.

In the context of second-personal political demands, such accountability must be mutual accountability. If you see your interlocutor as “susceptible to being held to account if [they flout] relationship-defining demands,”43 then you must also see yourself as susceptible to being held to account by them if you flout such demands. When you make a second-personal demand, in the words of Korsgaard, “you expect the other person to take your demand as giving him a reason, [and so] you are supposing that you have the authority to bind him by your command.”44 What grounds this authority? One way someone might have authority over another is if they stand in a relationship of hierarchy: e.g., one is a king and the other a servant, or one a commander and the other a footsoldier. But that is not the basis for the authority in this case; second-personal political engagement is not the issuing of orders from a ruler to their subordinate. Rather, second-personal political engagement derives its authority simply from the mutual dignity of persons. I can recognize in myself the authority to bind you by my command precisely because I can also recognize in you the authority to bind me by your commands. There is thus a presumption of reciprocity in the practice of second-personal political engagement: if I am to hold you to account for something, I must see myself as equally able to be held to account on that basis by you.

If you are not authentic, however, you are not in a position to hold political decision-makers to account if they fail to fulfill your demands. You, after all, are just the product of your situation; your beliefs and commitments are just the result of your upbringing and social environment, and you have not engaged in the work of determining for yourself who you are and what you stand for (or at least you have not been successful in that endeavor). Yet that is precisely what you have demanded of these political decision-makers—to go beyond where they find themselves, to reconsider their previous positions, to take an active and critical role in figuring out what they stand for and to reflect that revised perspective in how they act. You are not simply trying to pressure them into adopting a new commitment, or to manipulate them into changing their minds (for instance, by nudges or sophistry)—those would be third-personal techniques. What is distinctive to second-personal political engagement is precisely that one is making a demand to a person—that one is appealing to them “to take [one’s] demand as giving [them] a reason.”45 In other words, one is demanding of one’s interlocutor that they themselves interrogate and revise their beliefs and behavior.

There is thus a lack of reciprocity to expect political decision-makers to care about one’s demand in the right way (that is, to take an active role in interrogating their presuppositions, and to shape their own perspectives), if one is not authentic oneself. Since mutual accountability presupposes reciprocity, this lack of reciprocity undermines one’s ability to hold political decision-makers to account in respect of one’s second-personal demands. As Darwall argues, there is a relationship of mutual entailment between one’s ability to hold others to account for one’s demands, and their having second-personal reasons to comply with one’s demands.46 It follows that an inauthentic person cannot, in virtue of her second-personal political engagement, generate second-personal reasons for others to act, because she cannot hold those others to account if they fail to respond to her demands.

C. Answerability

The third condition I will discuss for second-personal political engagement is answerability. Shoemaker defines answerability as follows: “To be answerable… is to be susceptible for assessment of, and response to, the reasons one takes to justify one’s actions.”47 To see someone as answerable is to see the salient explanation for their actions as lying in their reasons and judgments; by contrast, one does not see them as answerable when one sees the salient explanation as lying in “how various psychological elements causally contributed to [their] being motivated to have or act on [some attitude] X.”48 If a political decision-maker is correct to see the most salient explanation of an activist’s demands as lying in how various psychological and historical elements caused the activist’s political engagement—in other words, if the activist is not answerable for the content of their demands—then the political decision-maker is justified in taking an objective standpoint toward them in respect of those demands. In that case, the activist’s second-personal political engagement would not generate second-personal reasons for the political decision-maker to act.

Intuitively, people who are inauthentic are not answerable for the content of the political demands they make. Imagine a cult where gullible believers are brainwashed into thinking that all taxation is evil. Suppose the believers regularly travel to government offices to protest against taxation. Policymakers might feel pity, or annoyance, but they are unlikely to take the cult’s demands seriously—assuming the cult does not wield much real-world power. I suspect they would instead take an objective standpoint, seeing the most salient explanation for the cult members’ demands as lying in their unfortunate circumstances. My intuition is that they would be correct to do so. Alternatively, consider the once ubiquitous phenomenon of “rainbow capitalism,” where major companies, led by their marketing departments, regularly sponsored Pride parades and tweeted milquetoast statements of support for the LGBTQ community without making significant pro-LGBTQ reforms to their internal operations. Policymakers are unlikely to take such actions seriously—instead, I suspect they would take an objective standpoint and see the most salient explanation for the content of these companies’ speech as lying in the causal impact of economic and cultural forces. Once again, my intuition is that they would be right to do so.

What lies behind this intuition? Someone who is authentic stands for what they believe in; they have actively sought to shape the self they have become, including their core beliefs and commitments, and they express that self in what they do. When such a person engages in second-personal political activity, the most salient explanation for the content of their demands lies in their own agency; after all, their demands, and the reasons that lie behind them, are themselves the product of that person’s agential activity. By contrast, the beliefs and actions of someone who is not authentic are shaped not by their own agency, but instead by their circumstances—their beliefs and actions merely express the world that created them. For such a person, the most salient explanation for the content of the demands they make is the causal influence of their environment.

This explains why one should take an objective standpoint toward inauthentic people in respect of their second-personal political activity. Inauthentic people are not answerable for the content of their political demands, because the most salient explanation for the content of those demands is not their own reasons and judgments, but instead the mere causal influence of psychological and historical factors. That is not to say that there are not other things inauthentic people are answerable for; they may be answerable for the fact that they engaged in second-personal political activity at all, for example, or for their behavior while doing so (in such cases, it may even be fitting for politicians or the public to blame inauthentic activists for disruptive behavior). Nonetheless, an inauthentic person’s second-personal political engagement does not generate second-personal reasons for others to act, in virtue of the fact that she is not answerable for the content of her second-personal political demands.

IV. CONCLUSION

Let me sum up. It is a mistake, I have argued, to think of authenticity as something primarily individual—a matter of individual accomplishment for which the individual is the main beneficiary. Instead, I have argued that authenticity should be understood as political. It is political, firstly, because it falls to us all both to ensure that people in our communities have the autonomy to take an active role in shaping their own lives, and to engage proactively in the second-personal work of helping others understand and shape themselves. The work of becoming authentic is not something that can be left up to the individual; instead, it should be seen as a collective, political project.

Secondly, it is only by becoming authentic that people can participate fully in political life. Authenticity plays an important role in both activism and leadership, by providing a condition for such behavior to generate the second-personal reasons at which such practices aim. Of course, even an inauthentic activist can communicate relevant information to political decision-makers, or force them to act by exerting political pressure. But much activism does not presume the power to force a leader’s hand, nor that decision-makers are unaware of the activists’ message, but rather involves the distinctly second-personal practices of making demands on leaders—speaking as an “I” (or a “we”) to a “you”—in an attempt “to create a better world by anticipating, claiming, and appealing to [them] that it should be so.”49 Similarly, while even an inauthentic leader can use her authority to command and direct her subordinates, showing leadership involves more than this: seeking to inspire one’s followers, entreating them to pursue some aspirational goal, to come together as a community, to overcome adversity together, etc. It is only if a leader is authentic, I have argued, that these demands will have normative force.

Notes

  1. Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3. [^]
  2. According to Dover (2023, p. 167), authenticity is a topic about which “Western philosophers have been particularly concerned, for the past three and a half centuries or so…” [^]
  3. Taylor 1992, p. 18. [^]
  4. Paul 2014, p. 85. [^]
  5. Mortimer 2025. [^]
  6. Berman 1970, p. ix. [^]
  7. Taylor 1992, p. 4. Taylor nonetheless defends authenticity against the charge that it necessarily leads to political disengagement and fragmentation. Taylor’s view is subtle, and I will discuss it further below. [^]
  8. Kohl, Christophe, Liebau, & Saupe 2021. [^]
  9. Hazlett 2023. [^]
  10. Jones 2016. Guignon defends a variation of this view. According to Guignon (2004, p. 82), authenticity involves both honesty and self-knowledge, demanding “people to get clear about what their own deliberations lead them to believe and to honestly and fully express what they conclude in public space.” On this view, people who frequently change their beliefs and/or fail to express them honestly are not authentic. [^]
  11. Hahl, Kim, & Zuckerman Sivan 2018. [^]
  12. One might wonder whether this is explained, as Hazlett (2023, p. 14) suggests, by differences in perspective or attention between Trump’s supporters and his detractors. Indeed, there is some evidence that his supporters give greater credence to his statements than non-supporters do (Swire, et al. 2017). However, drawing on a survey following the 2016 US Presidential Election, Hahl, Kim, and Zuckerman Sivan (2018, p. 3) cast doubt on this explanation: “most Trump supporters recognized one of his most notorious lies as false; Trump supporters nevertheless saw him as highly authentic; and Clinton supporters did not see Clinton as authentic, but instead emphasized other positive attributes such as her competence. These results are inconsistent with a simple theory of motivated reasoning, whereby partisans see all of their candidate’s blemishes as beautiful.” In two follow-up experiments, Hahl and colleagues find that rather than harming perceptions of authenticity, Trump’s flagrant dishonesty may have even increased perceptions of authenticity (Hahl, Kim, & Zuckerman Sivan 2018). These findings concord with Bailey and Iyengar’s (2022) review of recent psychological research on the topic, which argues that the relationship between honesty and (perceptions of) authenticity is complex: sometimes, “honesty can decrease authenticity and dishonesty can increase authenticity.” Fordahl (2018, p. 308) puts the point still more forcefully: “From the moment that Donald Trump’s political candidacy achieved plausibility, the popular press and the commentariat began what has become an endless examination of the man’s relationship with truth. How should one approach Donald Trump’s pronouncements? Should he be taken ‘literally’, or should he be taken ‘seriously’? … [S]uch questions seemed to have never occurred to the average Trump supporter. … [R]egardless of deception or falsehood or exaggeration, their candidate was trustworthy. He was trustworthy not because he told the truth, but because he lived a truth.” [^]
  13. Luebke 2021, p. 636. [^]
  14. To be clear, my claim is not that this is the only kind of authenticity that people demand of political actors, though I do take it to be a particularly prominent kind. Rather, my aim is to show why this is an entirely reasonable demand to make of political actors: to take an active role in shaping the self they become, and to express that self in what they do. [^]
  15. Darwall 2009. [^]
  16. Mogensen 2017. [^]
  17. Paul 2014, p. 105. [^]
  18. Westlund 2012, p. 59. [^]
  19. Taylor 1992, p. 33. [^]
  20. Ibid. [^]
  21. Plato 1997, Alcibiades 1 112e–113a. [^]
  22. I do not mean to imply that authenticity must always be understood as an exercise of self-improvement. While self-improvement is the goal of Alcibiades, authenticity could equally involve accepting oneself as one is, including one’s limitations and weaknesses. Part of the way we exert agential control over the person we become is through the imaginative work by which we construct our identity and give meanings to our attributes. This can extend to, for instance, coming to accept one’s limitations or embrace a stigmatized identity. For further discussion of this issue, see Mortimer (2025, pp. 5, 9–10). I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to clarify this point. [^]
  23. Bell 2024; Mortimer 2025. [^]
  24. Paul 2014, p. 105. [^]
  25. Ibid. [^]
  26. Socrates, as I have already noted, does not use the term “authenticity.” Nonetheless, I take this claim to be implicit in what Socrates demands of Alcibiades. [^]
  27. Dovi 2018. [^]
  28. McAfee & Howard 2023. [^]
  29. Darwall 2009, p. 12. [^]
  30. Darwall 2010, p. 217. [^]
  31. Ibid., p. 218. [^]
  32. Strawson 1962. [^]
  33. Mortimer 2025. [^]
  34. Not all demands are legitimate, of course. When authentic people make demands that are otherwise illegitimate, that does not create second-personal reasons for people to act. My claim is that authenticity provides an additional condition that must be met for second-personal political engagement to generate these second-personal reasons. In other words, if the demands are otherwise legitimate, it is the authenticity of the demander (e.g., the activist or leader) that determines whether their second-personal political engagement gives other people second-personal reasons to act. [^]
  35. To be clear, my claim is not that we should only take the participant stance toward authentic people, and the objective stance otherwise. Inauthentic people are, in general, just as appropriate targets of reactive attitudes as authentic people. Indeed, when inauthentic people engage in disruptive demonstrations, or inauthentic leaders make demands of their followers, it may be fitting to take a participant stance and feel resentment or anger toward them. What is not fitting, I will argue, is to take their second-personal political engagement to provide second-personal reasons to act. It is this narrower claim that I will defend. [^]
  36. Fletcher 1988. [^]
  37. In a legal context, standing is usually understood as “a threshold issue that involves whether the person who files a complaint is an appropriate party to litigate the matter” (Braman (2006) 312). This is out of necessity: the court faces a binary choice of whether to hear the case, and there are strong reasons not to hear cases when the degree of standing is insufficiently high. These include, for example, “ensuring that the people most directly concerned are able to litigate the questions at issue… and preventing the anti-majoritarian federal judiciary from usurping the policy-making functions of the popularly elected branches” (Fletcher 1988, p. 222). Finding the appropriate threshold for standing is complex in practice and has spawned a substantial legal literature. Nonetheless, implicit in this whole discussion is that there can be degrees of standing. If A injures B, this may indirectly harm additional parties C and D; C and D thereby have some standing against A, even if their standing is not sufficient for it to be worthwhile, all things considered, for courts to hear their case against A. [^]
  38. Darwall 2009, p. 60. [^]
  39. Mortimer 2025. [^]
  40. Darwall 2010, p. 217. Above, I noted that while standing is usually seen as a threshold matter in legal contexts, there is no need to think of it in this way. In the context of second-personal political engagement, it may make more sense to see it as a degreed notion. On this view, some people would have more standing than others to pursue second-personal political engagement, reflecting the degree to which their self is connected with the demand they are making, and the strength of the second-personal reasons that their political engagement produces would presumably be greater. This captures the intuition that the demands of those most personally affected by some issue should take political priority over the demands of those less affected, even though both may have some degree of standing to make these demands. A corollary of this is that if, as seems plausible, people can be more or less authentic, then their degree of authenticity would affect the strength of the second-personal reasons that their second-personal political demands produce. [^]
  41. Shoemaker 2011, p. 623. [^]
  42. Darwall 2009. [^]
  43. Shoemaker 2011, p. 623. [^]
  44. Korsgaard 2007, p. 8. [^]
  45. Ibid. [^]
  46. Darwall 2009. [^]
  47. Shoemaker 2011, p. 623. [^]
  48. Ibid. [^]
  49. McAfee & Howard 2023. [^]

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to many people for their help with this article, not least the following: Felipe Cuervo Restrepo; Marcus Field; Nina Strohminger; Jacob Mortimer; Alan Morrison; Rupert Younger; Katharine O’Reilly; Margaret Gray; members of the Study Group at the GSM, Kyoto University; participants in the 2026 Society for Business Ethics Annual Meeting; participants in the 2026 Business Ethics in the 6ix workshop; and two anonymous reviewers and the editor for this journal. I am also grateful for support from the Kyoto Institute of Philosophy and JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP26K00371.

COMPETING INTERESTS

The author declares that they have no competing interests.

REFERENCES

Bailey, Erica R., and Sheena S. Iyengar. 2022. Yours truly: on the complex relationship between authenticity and honesty. Current opinion in psychology, 47: 101419.  http://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2022.101419.

Bell, Rowan. 2024. Being your best self: authenticity, morality, and gender norms. Hypatia, 39 (1): 1–20.  http://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2023.96.

Berman, Marshall. 1970. The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society. New York: Atheneum.

Braman, Eileen. 2006. Reasoning on the threshold: testing the separability of preferences in legal decision making. Journal of Politics, 68 (2): 308–321.  http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2508.2006.00408.x.

Darwall, Stephen. 2009. The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Darwall, Stephen. 2010. Precis: The second-person standpoint. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (1): 216–228.  http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2010.00367.x.

Dover, Daniela. 2023. Identity and influence. Synthese, 202 (5): 167.  http://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04279-z.

Dovi, Suzanne. 2018. Political representation. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/political-representation/.

Fletcher, William A. 1988. The structure of standing. Yale Law Journal, 98 (2): 221–291.  http://doi.org/10.2307/796702.

Fordahl, Clayton. 2018. Authenticity: The sociological dimensions of a politically consequential concept. American Sociologist, 49 (2): 299–311.  http://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-017-9359-8.

Guignon, Charles. 2004. On Being Authentic. London: Routledge.

Hahl, Oliver, Minjae Kim, and Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan. 2018. The authentic appeal of the lying demagogue: proclaiming the deeper truth about political illegitimacy. American Sociological Review, 83 (1): 1–33.  http://doi.org/10.1177/0003122417749632.

Hazlett, Allan. 2023. Authenticity as transparency. Inquiry, in press.  http://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2023.2289153.

Jones, Ben. 2016. Authenticity in political discourse. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 19 (2): 489–504.  http://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-015-9649-6.

Kohl, Christoph; Barbara Christophe; Heike Liebau; and Achim Saupe, eds. 2021. The Politics of Authenticity and Populist Discourses: Media and Education in Brazil, India and Ukraine. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Korsgaard, Christine M. 2007. Autonomy and the second person within: a commentary on Stephen Darwall’s the second-person standpoint. Ethics, 118 (1): 8–23.  http://doi.org/10.1086/522019.

Luebke, Simon M. 2021. Political authenticity: conceptualization of a popular term. International Journal of Press/Politics, 26 (3): 635–653.  http://doi.org/10.1177/1940161220948013.

McAfee, Noëlle, and Katie B. Howard. 2023. Feminist political philosophy. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2023 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2023/entries/feminism-political/.

Mogensen, Andreas L. 2017. Moral testimony pessimism and the uncertain value of authenticity. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 95 (2): 261–284.  http://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12255.

Mortimer, Samuel A. 2025. Becoming authentic: a social conception of the self. Philosophical Quarterly, pqaf008 in press.  http://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqaf008.

Paul, Laurie Ann. 2014. Transformative experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Plato. 1997. Alcibiades, trans. D. S. Hutchinson. Pp. 557–595 in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing.

Shoemaker, David. 2011. Attributability, answerability, and accountability: toward a wider theory of moral responsibility. Ethics, 121 (3): 602–632.  http://doi.org/10.1086/659003.

Strawson, Peter F. 1962. Freedom and resentment. Proceedings of the British Academy, 48: 1–25.

Swire, Briony; Adam J. Berinsky; Stephan Lewandowskyl and Ullrich K. H. Ecker. 2017. Processing political misinformation: comprehending the Trump phenomenon. Royal Society Open Science, 4 (3): 160802.  http://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.160802.

Taylor, Charles. 1992. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Westlund, Andrea. 2012. Autonomy in relation. Pp. 59–82 in Out From the Shadows: Analytical Feminist Contributions to Traditional Philosophy, ed. Sharon L. Crasnow and Anita M. Superson. New York: Oxford University Press.

Share

Author details

Downloads

Information

Competing Interests

  • The author declares that they have no competing interests.

Citation

Download RIS Download BibTeX

File Checksums

(MD5)
  • PDF: 721ff0f5d266b1605e845fb2676e221b
  • XML: aedc447558f39d71c518bb052e68af5b

Table of Contents