ly with law.
             I begin (in Secs. I and II) with brief discussions of the ideas of justification and legitimacy
             and with an attempt to capture what ought to be most central in our concerns about these
             ideas. I turn then (in Sec. III) to two basic ways of thinking about the relation between
             justification and legitimacy that I want to distinguish: what I will call the Lockean and the
             Kantian approaches.(1) Next (in Sec. IV), I argue that the minority Lockean approach to
             this issue captures essential features of institutional evaluation that the majority Kantian
             approach does not, and I add (in Sec. V) brief mention of one further complication facing
             any adequate account of political evaluation.
             The project of "justifying the state" is one that we tend to associate with the great political
             treatises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and especially with those of the
             philosophers in the social contract tradition, such as Hobbes, Locke, or Kant. We study
             these historical texts in large measure because of their perceived contributions to a
             justificatory project that many feel confident in claiming as "the central task of social and
             political philosophy."(2) But for all this, we are not always as careful as we might be in
             specifying exactly what this justificatory project amounts to or how the justifications offered
             differ from other kinds of institutional evaluation defended within the same works. In order
             to clearly distinguish what I take to be two...