Exploring the Metaphorical (De)Construction of Legitimacy: Metaphors of Legitimation in Political Theory and Public Discourses (original) (raw)
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Journal of Political Power, 2011
Adapting Granovetter's idea of the 'strength of weak ties ' (1973), this article argues that capitalist, liberal democratic nation-states ('liberal societies') distribute both power and processes of legitimation widely across society. Against the view that such societies are only weakly legitimate, relying primarily on ideological hegemony, I argue that they enjoy real, but highly systemically diffused legitimacy. To advance this argument I consider some the inherent problems in studying legitimacy in liberal contexts, and offer a preliminary outline of a cultural analysis of liberal legitimacy, exploring how legitimation processes are embedded in state-economy relations, civil society structures, public-private distinctions, and competition as a ubiquitous social form. In this way I aim to encourage a more sociocultural, and less state-centric understanding of power and its legitimation in liberal society.
In recent years, the West has increasingly experienced the sense that the political aspects of its social life have undergone a profound alteration. There is a sense of blockage, of non-responsiveness, a feeling that the political class no longer represents the interests of the broader society. Underlying all of this is a loss of legitimacy. What exactly is legitimacy? How does it function? How is it lost? These are the questions that I address in this paper. While I refer to Max Weber’s remarks on legitimacy, my thesis is my own. My claim is that legitimacy involves temporal identity. It depends upon the ability of both individuals and peoples to identify themselves as the same over time. Legitimacy’s breakdown is the breakdown of this identity.
Three faces of the legitimacy crisis of liberal democracy : identity, rationality and universality
2001
Cataloged from PDF version of article.The thesis investigates the question of legitimacy crisis of liberal democracy as manifested by the processes, debates, concepts, popular demands and emerging new identities and forms of politics along the globalization phenomenon. It argues that this crisis is situated in three principal sites of the liberal theoretical and normative conceptualization: identity, rationality and universality. Then a dialogical and thematic reading is carried out among various theoretical positions in order to find out whether the current legitimacy crisis is an ephemeral or conjunctural development or rather it is a crisis which is exacerbated by the basic assumptions, modalities and configurations provided by the liberal democratic discourse. These positions are classical liberalism, the Rawlsian perspective and the communitarians, Habermas and the theory of deliberative democracy, and finally radical democracy and agonistic democracy approach within it. All th...
The Crisis of Legitimacy rewrite
The European Legacy , 2023
In recent years, the West has increasingly experienced the sense that the political aspects of its social life have undergone a profound alteration. There is a sense of blockage, of non--responsiveness, a feeling that the political class no longer represents the interests of the broader society. Underlying all of this is a loss of legitimacy. What exactly is legitimacy? How does it function? How is it lost? These are the questions that I address in this paper. While I refer to Max Weber’s remarks on legitimacy, my thesis is my own. My claim is that legitimacy involves temporal identity. It depends upon the ability of both individuals and peoples to identify themselves as the same over time. Legitimacy’s breakdown is the breakdown of this identity.
The Function of Political Institutions and the Concept of Legitimacy
Draft prepared for the ECPR General Conference 2013
In the first chapter of his Theory of Justice John Rawls distinguishes between two levels of abstraction in the analysis of practical concepts: The more general dimension of a concept on the one hand and the more specific level of various conceptions on the other (Rawls 1971: 5).
On the value of political legitimacy
Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 2011
Theories of political legitimacy normally stipulate certain conditions of legitimacy: the features a state must possess in order to be legitimate. Yet there is obviously a second question as to the value of legitimacy: the normative features a state has by virtue of it being legitimate (such as it being owed obedience, having a right to use coercion, or enjoying a general justification in the use of force). I argue that it is difficult to demonstrate that affording these to legitimate states is morally desirable, and that obvious alternative conceptions of the value of legitimacy (notably epistemic and instrumental) are not without problems of their own. The intuitive triviality of establishing the value of normative legitimacy may mask a serious problem.
The great chain of legitimacy: Justifying transnational democracy
The idea of a 'chain of legitimation' is a central thought in German constitutional theory. However, the conception of a chain of legitimacy does not appear to be sufficient to justify transnational democracy. Starting from this diagnosis, the paper introduces an alternative conception of transnational legitimacy. In this conception, the layer of legitimacy provided by the chain of legitimation is complemented by a layer of legitimacy that is provided by political practices at the micro-level of the political process. Our conception of transnational legitimacy - which is based on a twofold concept of normativity that distinguishes between an explicit and an implicit dimension of normativity - presents a deeper understanding of where to locate the normative forces at play within the political process. The aim of the paper is to show that at the transnational level, democratic legitimacy can only emerge if the long and abstract legitimation chains are normatively backed by pol...
2015
Both popular and academic explanations of the stability, performance and breakdown of political order make heavy use of the concept of legitimacy. But prevalent understandings of the idea of legitimacy, while perhaps useful and appropriate ways of making sense of the political world in ordinary public discourse, cannot play the more rigorous explanatory roles with which they are tasked in the social sciences. To the extent that the concept of legitimacy appears to have some explanatory value, this is only because explanations of social and political order that appeal to legitimacy in fact conceal widely different (and often inconsistent) accounts of the mechanisms involved in the production of obedience to authority and submission to norms. It is suggested in this article that explanatory social science would be better off abandoning the coarse concept of legitimacy for more precise accounts of the operation of these mechanisms in particular contexts.
Legitimacy and the quality of democracy
International Social Science Journal, 2009
This article discusses the connections between legitimacy and the quality of democracy. The multiple dimensions of the quality of democracy are presented and it is shown that legitimacy is at the core of the definition of responsiveness. Citizens' reactions to government policies are analysed. Also stressed are the limits and constraints of considering responsiveness only in relationship to citizens' attitudes towards government and institutions. Other dimensions are taken into account, particularly electoral accountability.