Approved by referendum, never enacted: legality and legitimacy coming apart in public.
Legitimacy
The entitlement to exercise power - as distinct from the ability to exercise it.
- Theme
- Society, politics and power
- Tradition
- Cross-tradition
- Term fixed
- 1651
In plain terms
A regime can have complete control and no entitlement to it. Everyone can obey and nobody think it has the right.
That gap is what legitimacy names, and it matters practically because ruling on force alone is expensive. A government that is obeyed because people accept its authority needs far less coercion than one obeyed only because of what happens otherwise, which is why every regime, including the worst, spends effort on the claim.
The hard part is what makes the claim good. Descent, divine appointment, tradition, election, consent, competence and results have all been offered. Each has been believed by large populations, and each looks arbitrary from outside the arrangement that made it convincing - which is either a reason for scepticism or the reason the question is genuinely difficult.
As a philosopher would put it
Weber's typology is descriptive: authority is accepted as traditional, charismatic or legal-rational, and the classification concerns what makes people obey rather than what would justify obedience.
Normative accounts divide over consent. Locke grounds legitimacy in the consent of the governed, with tacit consent doing the work for those who never agreed - a move Hume attacked as a fiction, noting that the alternative for most people is exile or starvation. Rawls locates it in principles that free and equal citizens could reasonably accept. Democratic accounts make procedure decisive, and instrumental accounts make it depend on outcomes.
The distinction between legitimacy and justice matters and is often lost: a legitimate government can enact unjust laws and retain the entitlement to be obeyed, which is what makes political obligation a separate question. And philosophical anarchism holds that no state has ever met the conditions, which is a minority position that nobody has decisively refuted.
Where you meet it
After the 2008 banking collapse Iceland set out to write a new constitution by an unusually direct route. A national forum of 950 randomly selected citizens identified values in 2010; a Constitutional Council of twenty-five non-politicians, elected by the public, drafted the text in 2011, publishing drafts online and incorporating public comments.
In October 2012 the draft was put to a non-binding referendum. About two-thirds of those voting approved it, on a turnout near half the electorate.
It was never enacted. Parliament did not pass it, and the process stalled after the 2013 election. The draft had an unusually strong claim to legitimacy by procedure - random selection, direct election, open drafting, popular approval - and no legal force, because the existing constitution's amendment rules were not met. Legality and legitimacy came apart in public, in a stable democracy, and the resulting stalemate is still being argued about.
What is actually disputed
Whether legitimacy is a matter of procedure or of results.
Proceduralists hold that a decision reached the right way binds even when it is a bad decision, because there is no independent standard both sides accept - which is the whole point of having a procedure. Instrumentalists hold that a government producing catastrophic outcomes has forfeited its claim regardless of how it was constituted, and that treating procedure as sufficient is how legality launders injustice.
Both face the same awkward case: a properly elected government dismantling the conditions of future elections.
Underneath sits the consent problem. Nobody alive consented to the constitution they live under, and tacit consent - staying in the country, using the roads - looks like a fiction constructed to fill a hole. Hume said so, and no account of political obligation since has answered him to general satisfaction.
Commonly confused with
- Justice c. 380 BC A legitimate government can pass unjust laws. Conflating the two removes the vocabulary for saying so.
- recognition by other states Diplomatic recognition is a fact about international relations. It tracks legitimacy loosely and sometimes not at all.
Defined against
- Power The distinction between being able to rule and being entitled to is the founding move of the whole subject
Philosophers
- Thomas Hobbes Legitimacy from a covenant that escapes the state of nature
- John Locke Consent of the governed, and the right of resistance
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau The general will as the only legitimate sovereign
- David Hume The attack on consent as a historical and philosophical fiction
- Hannah Arendt Legitimacy as arising from people acting in concert
Works
- Leviathan Authorisation and the sovereign
- Two Treatises of Government Consent, trust and the right of resistance
- The Social Contract The general will
- The Muqaddimah Solidarity, and the cycle of dynastic legitimacy
- Democracy in America Legitimacy in a society of equals
- A Theory of Justice Principles free and equal citizens could accept
Schools
- Natural Law Where legitimacy is measured against a higher standard
- British Empiricism Where it rests on consent and is then doubted
- Communitarianism Where it depends on shared understandings
- Classical Marxism Where it is treated as a form of ideology
- Frankfurt School (Critical Theory) Where legitimation crisis becomes a subject
Related concepts
Power 1532 · Justice c. 380 BC · Rights 1689 · Social contract 1651 · Sovereignty 1651
The question of what entitles anyone to rule is ancient; the modern form, in which legitimacy derives from the governed rather than from God or nature, is seventeenth-century and Hobbes's Leviathan is its sharpest early statement.