LEGITIMACY

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 421.

Legitimacy (from the Latin legitimare, meaning ‘to declare lawful') broadly means rightfulness. Legitimacy confers upon an order or command an authoritative or binding character, thus transforming *power into *authority. It differs from legality in that the latter does not necessarily guarantee that *government is respected or that citizens acknowledge a duty of obedience. However, the term legitimacy is used differently in *political philosophy and *political science. Political philosophers generally treat legitimacy as a moral or rational principle, as the grounds upon which governments may demand obedience from their citizens. The claim to legitimacy is thus more important than the fact of obedience. Political scientists, on the other hand, usually view legitimacy in sociological terms, that is, as a willingness to comply with a system of rule regardless of how this is achieved. Following Max Weber (1864–1920), this position takes legitimacy to mean a belief in legitimacy; in other words, a belief in the ‘right to rule'.

Significance

The issue of legitimacy is linked to the oldest and one of the most fundamental of political debates: the problem of political *obligation. In examining whether citizens have a duty to respect the *state and obey its *laws, social contract theorists such as Hobbes (1588–1679) and Locke (1632–1704) were considering the question: when, and on what basis, may government exercise legitimate authority over society? In modern political debate, however, legitimacy addresses not the question of why people should obey the state, in an abstract sense, but the question of why they do obey a particular state or system of rule. The classic contribution to the understanding of legitimacy as a sociological phenomenon was provided by Weber, who identified three types of political legitimacy based, respectively, upon history and customs (traditional authority), the power of personality (charismatic authority) and a framework of formal, legal rules (legal-rational authority). In Weber's view, modern societies are increasingly characterised by the exercise of legal-rational authority and a form of legitimacy that arises from respect for formal and usually legal rules.

An alternative to the Weberian approach to legitimacy has been developed by neo-Marxist theorists, who focus upon the mechanisms through which capitalist societies constrain class antagonisms, that is, by manufacturing *consent via the extension of *democracy and social reform. Legitimacy is thus linked to the maintenance of ideological *hegemony. In this light neo-Marxists such as Jürgen Habermas (1973) have identified ‘legitimation crises' in capitalist societies that make it difficult for them to maintain political stability through consent alone. At the heart of these ‘crisis tendencies' lies the alleged contradiction between the logic of capitalist accumulation on the one hand, and the popular pressures which democratic politics unleashes on the other.