Modern authority does not merely govern through institutions, laws or coercive commands, but through the production of categories that determine which lives, bodies, environments, futures and knowledges become intelligible. Power becomes legitimate when its vocabulary appears descriptive rather than political: when “market”, “population”, “threshold”, “access”, “data”, “health”, “development” or “science” seem to name reality itself rather than organise it. Across Polanyi, Murphy, Liboiron, Hamraie, Gabrys, Berlant and Santos, legitimation appears as the authority to define value, harm, normality, evidence and knowledge. Polanyi shows that the capitalist market legitimates itself by treating labour, land and money as commodities, although none of them is produced for sale; Murphy demonstrates how twentieth-century technoscience transformed reproduction, fertility and non-birth into economic variables; Liboiron argues that pollution is colonial because it presumes access to Land as sink, resource or expendable surface. Hamraie exposes the built environment as a material language that decides which bodies count as users; Gabrys shows that sensors do not merely detect pollution, but configure citizenship, evidence and political agency; Berlant names the ordinary attrition through which populations are slowly worn down by conditions that make survival itself exhausting; and Santos diagnoses abyssal thinking, the epistemic structure through which Western modernity renders entire peoples, practices and knowledges nonexistent. Their shared insight is that domination rarely announces itself as domination. It more often speaks through neutralising words that make historical arrangements appear natural, technical, inevitable or benevolent. The central question is therefore not only who rules, but who names the world in such a way that rule becomes common sense.

Polanyi provides the foundational economic grammar for this argument because he shows that the so-called self-regulating market was never spontaneous, natural or politically innocent. It had to be produced through law, state power, institutional redesign and ideological persuasion. Its most powerful act of legitimation was the invention of fictitious commodities: labour, land and money were treated as if they were commodities made for exchange, although labour is human activity, land is nature, and money is a social institution. This fiction allowed market society to present itself as rational and inevitable while subordinating human beings, ecological life and financial stability to price mechanisms. The word “market” therefore performs extraordinary political work: it converts social relations into exchange relations and makes protective institutions appear as external interference rather than necessary safeguards. Murphy extends this logic into the twentieth-century governance of population by showing how demography, development policy, Cold War planning and reproductive science transformed aggregate life into an object of economic calculation. Through the economization of life, reproduction became legible less as embodiment, kinship or social relation than as a variable in national productivity, demographic optimisation and future economic burden. Fertility, mortality and non-birth were incorporated into a regime of valuation in which some lives appeared investable, while others appeared excessive, costly or preventable. Her analysis of U.S.–Bangladeshi family-planning infrastructures reveals how global health, postcolonial governance and quantitative social science generated systems that did not merely describe population, but helped govern whose reproduction should be encouraged, delayed or reduced. Polanyi and Murphy thus show that legitimation operates by abstraction: the market abstracts labour from workers and land from ecological relations; population science abstracts lives from bodies, histories, places and obligations. In both cases, power becomes legitimate when abstraction is mistaken for reality, and when the word “economy” becomes the privileged language through which life itself is evaluated.

Liboiron and Gabrys shift the problem into environmental knowledge, where legitimation depends upon deciding what pollution is, how it should be measured, and whose evidence can count. Liboiron rejects the idea that pollution is merely ecological damage or an unfortunate side effect of industrial capitalism. Pollution is colonial because it presupposes a relation of entitlement to Land: someone must be allowed to treat Land, water, bodies and ecosystems as available for contamination, extraction, disposal or remediation. The dominant “threshold theory of pollution” is especially revealing because it assumes that environments and bodies can absorb a certain quantity of harm before damage becomes scientifically actionable. The word “threshold” therefore legitimates violence by converting contamination into a matter of acceptable limits. Liboiron’s anticolonial science refuses this premise by insisting that method itself is a Land relation; scientific practice must be accountable not only to data quality, but also to place, obligation, Indigenous sovereignty and the refusal of colonial access. Gabrys offers a parallel critique of environmental data politics. Citizen-sensing projects often promise democratic empowerment by giving communities tools to measure pollution, yet sensors do not simply record the world. They configure what counts as evidence, who counts as a competent sensing subject, how pollution becomes comparable, and which claims can travel into regulatory or policy arenas. Low-cost air-quality monitors, tool kits and DIY environmental platforms may expand participation, but they also introduce new inequalities around calibration, maintenance, interpretation, technical literacy and institutional credibility. Gabrys’s concept of open-air instrumentalism is crucial because it refuses both technocratic faith and technological rejection: sensors are instruments that make worlds by organising relations among bodies, environments, publics and authorities. Liboiron and Gabrys therefore demonstrate that environmental power is legitimated not only by hiding pollution, but by deciding the terms under which pollution becomes knowable. The word “data” is never innocent; it can authorise accountability, but it can also reproduce colonial, regulatory and technical hierarchies.

Hamraie and Berlant bring this analysis closer to the body, showing how legitimacy is produced through norms of usability, health, productivity and endurance. Hamraie reinterprets Universal Design not as a neutral project of benevolent inclusion, but as a contested field in which disability, architecture, expertise and citizenship are mutually produced. The question “who counts as everyone?” exposes the politics hidden inside apparently generous design language. When designers claim to build for “all”, they often rely on measurements, ergonomic standards and user models that already privilege certain bodies while marginalising others. Access is therefore not simply a technical solution added to an otherwise neutral environment; it is a form of access-knowledge, a historically situated way of knowing bodies and translating them into ramps, widths, signs, surfaces, thresholds and standards. The Capitol Crawl of 1990 shows this with extraordinary force: disabled activists crawling up the steps of the U.S. Capitol transformed architectural exclusion into a public indictment of citizenship itself. Stairs became a political sentence. Berlant’s concept of slow death similarly reveals how power operates through ordinary conditions that wear bodies down gradually rather than spectacularly. In her analysis of obesity, sovereignty and lateral agency, public discourse legitimates structural harm by redescribing it as personal failure. Food systems, poverty, racialised inequality, overwork, stress, inadequate healthcare and limited public infrastructure disappear behind the moral vocabulary of choice, discipline and responsibility. Berlant’s crucial intervention is to show that survival practices do not always look like heroic resistance; they may appear as maintenance, comfort, interruption, eating, resting or enduring. Her concept of lateral agency challenges liberal models of the self-commanding subject by showing that people living inside crisis ordinariness often act in ways that keep them going without transforming the conditions that exhaust them. Hamraie and Berlant therefore reveal two linked legitimating vocabularies: “access” can legitimate exclusion when it is reduced to compliance, while “health” can legitimate abandonment when structural depletion is blamed on individual bodies. Both authors insist that bodies are political archives of the environments, infrastructures and norms through which power becomes ordinary.

Santos provides the broadest epistemological frame because every regime of legitimation depends upon a regime of knowledge. Epistemologies of the South argues that social justice is impossible without cognitive justice, since domination functions not only by exploiting labour, colonising Land or disciplining bodies, but also by destroying or discrediting ways of knowing. His concept of abyssal thinking names the invisible line through which Western modernity divides recognised reality from what it renders nonexistent, primitive, backward or disposable. On one side of the line stand science, law, development, democracy and reason as authorised languages of truth; on the other side stand Indigenous knowledges, popular practices, subaltern memories, ecological reciprocities and resistant cosmologies, often treated as folklore, superstition or absence. This is epistemicide: the destruction of knowledge as a condition for the legitimacy of colonial and capitalist modernity. Santos’s proposal for ecologies of knowledges and intercultural translation does not reject science, but refuses its monopoly over reality. This conclusion allows all the authors to be read together. Polanyi shows the epistemic violence of market abstraction; Murphy shows the calculative violence of population economics; Liboiron exposes colonial assumptions inside pollution science; Gabrys politicises environmental sensing; Hamraie challenges expert definitions of the universal user; Berlant contests the moralisation of bodily attrition; and Santos names the broader epistemological order that makes some worlds appear as knowledge and others as noise. Their collective lesson is that power becomes legitimate when its words appear universal, technical or natural, and it becomes contestable when those words are returned to struggle. A critical politics of legitimation must therefore ask not only what institutions do, but what vocabularies they require; not only who is governed, but who is made knowable; not only what harms occur, but which harms are granted reality. The task is not to replace one sovereign vocabulary with another, but to open a democratic, anticolonial and materially accountable field in which markets, bodies, environments, technologies and futures can be renamed from the standpoint of those who have been measured, designed, polluted, depleted, excluded or rendered absent.

Bibliography
Berlant, L. (2011) ‘Slow Death (Obesity, Sovereignty, Lateral Agency)’, in Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 95–119.

Gabrys, J. (2019) How to Do Things with Sensors. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Hamraie, A. (2017) Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Liboiron, M. (2021) Pollution Is Colonialism. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Murphy, M. (2017) The Economization of Life. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Polanyi, K. (2001) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. 2nd Beacon Paperback edn. Boston: Beacon Press.

Santos, B. de S. (2014) Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.