Concept-Legitimacy
BA (H)-I, Political Theory
Prof. Awadhesh Kr. Singh
• In political science, legitimacy is the right and acceptance of an authority,
usually a governing law or a regime.
• In moral philosophy, the term "legitimacy" is often positively interpreted as
the normative status conferred by a governed people upon their governors'
institutions, offices, and actions, based upon the belief that their government's
actions are appropriate uses of power by a legally constituted government.
• The Enlightenment-era British social philosopher John Locke (1632–1704)
said that political legitimacy derives from popular explicit and implicit consent
of the governed: "The argument of the [Second] Treatise is that the government
is not legitimate unless it is carried on with the consent of the governed."
• The American political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset said that legitimacy
also "involves the capacity of a political system to engender and maintain the
belief that existing political institutions are the most appropriate and proper
ones for the society".
• Political scientist Robert A. Dahl explained legitimacy as a reservoir: so long
as the water is at a given level, political stability is maintained, if it falls below
the required level, political legitimacy is endangered.
The three types of political legitimacy(authority) described by
German sociologist Max Weber are traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal:
• Traditional legitimacy derives from societal custom and habit that emphasize
the history of the authority of tradition. Traditionalists understand this form of
rule as historically accepted, hence its continuity, because it is the way society
has always been. Therefore, the institutions of traditional government usually
are historically continuous, as in monarchy and tribalism.
• Charismatic legitimacy derives from the ideas and personal charisma of the
leader, a person whose authoritative persona charms and psychologically
dominates the people of the society to agreement with the government's régime
and rule. A charismatic government usually features weak political and
administrative institutions, because they derive authority from the persona of
the leader, and usually disappear without the leader in power. However, if the
charismatic leader has a successor, a government derived from charismatic
legitimacy might continue.
• Rational-legal legitimacy derives from a system of institutional procedure,
wherein government institutions establish and enforce law and order in the
public interest. Therefore, it is through public trust that the government will
abide the law that confers rational-legal legitimacy.
Establishing what qualifies as a legitimate form of government continues to be a topic
of great philosophical controversy. Forms of legitimate government are posited to
include:
•Communism: The legitimacy of a Communist state derives from having won a civil
war, a revolution, or from having won an election, such as the Presidency of Salvador
Allende (1970–73) in Chile; thus, the actions of the Communist government are
legitimate, authorised by the people. In the early twentieth century, Communist
parties based the arguments supporting the legitimacy of their rule and government
upon the scientific nature of Marxism.
•Constitutionalism: The modern political concept of constitutionalism establishes
the law as supreme over the private will, by integrating nationalism, democracy, and
limited government. The political legitimacy of constitutionalism derives from
popular belief and acceptance that the actions of the government are legitimate
because they abide by the law codified in the political constitution. The political
scientist Carl Joachim Friedrich (1901–84) said that, in dividing political power
among the organs of government, constitutional law effectively restrains the actions
of the government.
•Democracy: In a democracy, government legitimacy derives from the popular
perception that the elected government abides by democratic principles in governing,
and thus is legally accountable to its people.
•Fascism: In the 1920s and the 1930s, fascism based its political legitimacy upon the
arguments of traditional authority; respectively, the German National Socialists and
the Italian Fascists claimed that the political legitimacy of their right to rule derived
from philosophically denying the (popular) political legitimacy of
elected liberal democratic governments. During the Weimar Republic (1918–33), the
political philosopher Carl Schmitt (1888–1985)—whose legal work as the "Crown
Jurist of the Third Reich" promoted fascism and deconstructed liberal democracy—
addressed the matter in Legality and Legitimacy, 1932, an anti-
democratic polemic treatise that asked: How can parliamentary government make for
law and legality, when a 49 per cent minority accepts as politically legitimate the
political will of a 51 per cent majority?
•Monarchy: In a monarchy, the divine right of kings establishes the political
legitimacy of the rule of the monarch (king or queen); legitimacy also derives from
the popular perception (tradition and custom) and acceptance of the monarch as the
rightful ruler of nation and country. Contemporarily, such divine-right legitimacy is
manifest in the absolute monarchy of the House of Saud (est. 1744), a royal
family who have ruled and governed Saudi Arabia since the 18th century.
Moreover, constitutional monarchy is a variant form of monarchic political
legitimacy which combines traditional authority and legal–rational authority, by
which means the monarch maintains nationalist unity (one people) and democratic
administration (a political constitution).
