But some think that the moral obligation to obey political authority can be separated from an account of legitimate authority, or at least that such obligations arise only if further conditions hold. Next there are questions about the requirements of legitimacy. When are political institutions and the decisions made within them appropriately called legitimate? Some have argued that this question has to be answered primarily on the basis of procedural features that shape these institutions and underlie the decisions made.
Others argue that legitimacy depends—exclusively or at least in part—on the substantive values that are realized. A related question is: does political legitimacy demand democracy or not? This question is intensely debated both in the national and the global context. Insofar as democracy is seen as necessary for political legitimacy, when are democratic decisions legitimate?
Can that question be answered with reference to procedural features only, or does democratic legitimacy depend both on procedural values and on the quality of the decisions made? Finally, there is the question which political institutions are subject to the legitimacy requirement.
Historically, legitimacy was associated with the state and institutions and decisions within the state. The contemporary literature tends to judge this as too narrow, however.
This raises the question how the concept of legitimacy may apply—beyond the nation state and decisions made within it—to the international and global context. In his sociology, Max Weber put forward a very influential account of legitimacy that excludes any recourse to normative criteria Mommsen As is well known, Weber distinguishes among three main sources of legitimacy—understood as the acceptance both of authority and of the need to obey its commands.
People may have faith in a particular political or social order because it has been there for a long time tradition , because they have faith in the rulers charisma , or because they trust its legality—specifically the rationality of the rule of law Weber []; Weber identifies legitimacy as an important explanatory category for social science, because faith in a particular social order produces social regularities that are more stable than those that result from the pursuit of self-interest or from habitual rule-following Weber On one view, held by John Rawls and Ripstein , for example, legitimacy refers, in the first instance, to the justification of coercive political power.
Whether a political body such as a state is legitimate and whether citizens have political obligations towards it depends, on this view on whether the coercive political power that the state exercises is justified.
On a widely held alternative view, legitimacy is linked to the justification of political authority. On this view, political bodies such as states may be effective, or de facto , authorities, without being legitimate.
They claim the right to rule and to create obligations to be obeyed, and as long as these claims are met with sufficient acquiescence, they are authoritative. Legitimate authority, on this view, differs from merely effective or de facto authority in that it actually holds the right to rule and creates political obligations e. Raz On some views, even legitimate authority is not sufficient to create political obligations. The thought is that a political authority such as a state may be permitted to issue commands that citizens are not obligated to obey Dworkin Based on a view of this sort, some have argued that legitimate political authority only gives rise to political obligations if additional normative conditions are satisfied e.
Wellman ; Edmundson ; Buchanan There is sometimes a tendency in the literature to equate the normative concept of legitimacy with justice. Some explicitly define legitimacy as a criterion of minimal justice e. Hampton ; Buchanan Unfortunately, there is sometimes also a tendency to blur the distinction between the two concepts, and a lot of confusion arises from that.
Someone might claim, for example, that while political authorities such as states are often unjust, only a just state is morally acceptable and legitimate in this sense. The emerging literature on realist political theory criticizes this tendency to blur the distinction between legitimacy and justice e.
Rawls , clearly distinguishes between the two concepts, of course. In his view, while justice and legitimacy are related—they draw on the same set of political values—they have different domains and legitimacy makes weaker demands than justice ; ff.
A state may be legitimate but unjust, but the converse is not possible. Pettit ff distinguishes more sharply between the two concepts. According to Pettit, a state is just if it imposes a social order that promotes freedom as non-domination for all its citizens. It is legitimate if it imposes a social order in an appropriate way. A state that fails to impose a social order in an appropriate way, however just the social order may be, is illegitimate.
Vice versa, a legitimate state may fail to impose a just social order. Political realists also lend support to those who have questioned any sharp distinction between descriptive and normative concepts of legitimacy e. Habermas ; Beetham ; Horton The objection to a strictly normative concept of legitimacy is that it is of only limited use in understanding actual processes of legitimation.
The charge is that philosophers tend to focus too much on the general conditions necessary for the justification of political institutions, but neglect the historical actualization of the justificatory process. This section lays out the different ways in which legitimacy, understood normatively, can be seen as relating to political authority, coercion, and political obligations.
The normative concept of political legitimacy is often seen as related to the justification of authority. The main function of political legitimacy, on this interpretation, is to explain the difference between merely effective or de facto authority and legitimate authority.
John Locke put forward such an interpretation of legitimacy. The solution to this problem is a social contract that transfers political authority to a civil state that can realize and secure the natural law. According to Locke, and contrary to his predecessor Thomas Hobbes, the social contract thus does not create authority.
Political authority is embodied in individuals and pre-exists in the state of nature. The social contract transfers the authority they each enjoy in the state of nature to a particular political body. While political authority thus pre-exists in the state of nature, legitimacy is a concept that is specific to the civil state. Because the criterion of legitimacy that Locke proposes is historical, however, what counts as legitimate authority remains connected to the state of nature.
The legitimacy of political authority in the civil state depends, according to Locke, on whether the transfer of authority has happened in the right way. Although Locke emphasises consent, consent is not, however, sufficient for legitimate authority because an authority that suspends the natural law is necessarily illegitimate e.
Simmons On some interpretations of Locke e. Pitkin , consent is not even necessary for legitimate political authority; it is only a marker of illegitimacy. Whether an actual political regime respects the constraints of the natural law is thus at least one factor that determines its legitimacy. This criterion of legitimacy is negative: it offers an account of when effective authority ceases to be legitimate.
When a political authority fails to secure consent or oversteps the boundaries of the natural law, it ceases to be legitimate and, therefore, there is no longer an obligation to obey its commands. For Locke—unlike for Hobbes—political authority can thus not be absolute.
John Simmons uses them to argue that we should distinguish between the moral justification of states in general and the political legitimacy of actual states. I will come back to this point in section 3. Joseph Raz links legitimacy to the justification of political authority.
According to Raz, political authority is just a special case of the more general concept of authority , , He defines authority in relation to a claim—of a person or an agency—to generate what he calls pre-emptive reasons.
Such reasons replace other reasons for action that people might have. For example, if a teacher asks her students to do some homework, she expects her say-so to give the students reason to do the homework. Authority is effective, on this view, if it gets people to act on the reasons it generates. There are limits to what even a legitimate authority can rightfully order others to do, which is why it does not necessarily replace all relevant reasons.
When is effective or de facto authority legitimate? In other words, what determines whether the pre-emption thesis is satisfied?
The normal justification thesis explains why those governed by a legitimate authority ought to treat its directives as binding.
It thus follows as a corollary of the normal justification thesis that such an authority generates a duty to be obeyed. Note that even though legitimate authority is defined as a special case of effective authority, only the former is appropriately described as a serving its subjects.
Illegitimate—but effective—authority does not serve those it aims to govern, although it may purport to do so. The idea expressed by the warranty thesis is that legitimacy morally justifies an independently existing authority such that the claims of the authority become moral obligations. Those who link political legitimacy to the problem of justifying authority tend to think of political coercion as only a means that legitimate states may use to secure their authority.
According to a second important interpretation, by contrast, the main function of legitimacy is precisely to justify coercive power. For an excellent discussion of the two interpretations of legitimacy and a defense of the coercion-based interpretation, see Ripstein ; see also Hampton On coercion-based interpretations, the main problem that a conception of legitimacy aims to solve is how to distinguish the rightful use of political power from mere coercion.
One way to capture the thought is that, on these views, legitimacy relates to the way in which the rightful use of political power creates or constitutes political authority. Again, there are different ways in which this idea might be understood. Both manners of creating a sovereign are equally legitimate.
And political authority will be legitimate as long as the sovereign ensures the protection of the citizens, as Hobbes believes that the natural right to self-preservation cannot be relinquished Leviathan , chapter Beyond that, however, there can be no further questions about the legitimacy of the sovereign.
Another way in which the relation between legitimacy and the creation of authority may be understood is that the attempt to rule without legitimacy is an attempt to exercise coercive power—not authority.
Rousseau contrasts a legitimate social order with a system of rules that is merely the expression of power. Coercive power is primarily a feature of the civil state. While there are some forms of coercive power even in the state of nature—for example the power of parents over their children—Rousseau assumes that harmful coercive power arises primarily in the civil state and that this creates the problem of legitimacy.
Such a state would be legitimate. Legitimate political authority is created by convention, reached within the civil state. Specifically, Rousseau suggests that legitimacy arises from the democratic justification of the laws of the civil state Social Contract I:6; cf.
For Kant, as for Hobbes, political authority is created by the establishment of political institutions in the civil state. It does not pre-exist in individuals in the state of nature. What exists in the pre-civil social state, according to Kant, is the moral authority of each individual qua rational being and a moral obligation to form a civil state.
It helps people conform to certain rules by eliminating what today would be called the free-riding problem or the problem of partial compliance. The civil state, according to Kant, establishes the rights necessary to secure equal freedom.
Unlike for Locke and his contemporary followers, however, coercive power is not a secondary feature of the civil state, necessary to back up laws. According to Kant, coercion is part of the idea of rights. The thought can be explained as follows. Any right of a person—independently of whether it is respected or has been violated—implies a restriction for others. Coercion, in this view, is thus not merely a means for the civil state to enforce rights as defenders of an authority-based concept of legitimacy claim.
Instead, according to Kant, it is constitutive of the civil state. Legitimacy, for Kant, depends on a particular interpretation of the social contract. For Kant, the social contract which establishes the civil state is not an actual event. The criterion is the following: each law should be such that all individuals could have consented to it. The social contract, according to Kant, is thus a hypothetical thought experiment, meant to capture an idea of public reason. As such, it sets the standard for what counts as legitimate political authority.
Because of his particular interpretation of the social contract, Kant is not a social contract theorist in the strict sense. The idea of a contract is nevertheless relevant for his understanding of legitimacy. On the difference between voluntaristic and rationalistic strands in liberalism, see Waldron Kant, unlike Hobbes, recognizes the difference between legitimate and effective authority. For the head of the civil state is under an obligation to obey public reason and to enact only laws to which all individuals could consent.
If he violates this obligation, however, he still holds authority, even if his authority ceases to be legitimate. Kant famously denied that there is a right to revolution Kant, Perpetual Peace , Appendix II; for a recent discussion, see Flikschuh This obligation is such that it is incompatible with a right to revolution. A right to revolution would be in contradiction with the idea that individuals are bound by public law, but without the idea of citizens being bound by public law, there cannot be a civil state—only anarchy.
As mentioned earlier, however, there is a duty to establish a civil state. In particular, the obligation to obey does not cease when the laws are unjust.
But Kant stresses that the head of state is bound by the commands of public reason. While there is no right to revolution, political authority is only legitimate if the head of state respects the social contract.
But political obligations arise even from illegitimate authority. In , Ripstein argued that much of the contemporary literature on political legitimacy has been dominated by a focus on the justification of authority, rather than coercive political power Ripstein In the literature since then, it looks as if the tables are turning, especially if one considers the debates on international and global legitimacy section 5.
But prominent earlier coercion-based accounts include those by Nagel and by contemporary Kantians such as Rawls and Habermas to be discussed in sections 3.
Let me briefly mention other important coercion-based interpretations. Her theory links the authority of the state to its ability to enforce a solution to coordination and cooperation problems. Coercion is the necessary feature that enables the state to provide an effective solution to these problems, and the entitlement to use coercion is what constitutes the authority of the state. The entitlement to use coercion distinguishes such minimally legitimate political authority from a mere use of power.
Hampton draws a further distinction between minimal legitimacy and what she calls full moral legitimacy, which obtains when political authority is just.
Buchanan also argues that legitimacy is concerned with the justification of coercive power. Buchanan points out that this makes legitimacy a more fundamental normative concept than authority. Like Hampton, he advocates a moralized interpretation of legitimacy. Political authority, in his approach, obtains if an entity is legitimate in this sense and if some further conditions, relating to political obligation, are met Stilz offers a coercion-centered account of state legitimacy that draws on both Kant and Rousseau.
Historically speaking, the dominant view has been that legitimate political authority entails political obligations. While this is still the view many hold, not all do. Some take the question of what constitutes legitimate authority to be distinct from the question of what political obligations people have.
Ronald Dworkin defends a view of this sort. Dworkin treats political obligations as a fundamental normative concept in its own right.
For a critical discussion of this account, see Simmons ; Wellman Applbaum offers a conceptual argument to challenge the view that legitimate political authority entails an obligation to obey. But, Applbaum argues, Hohfeldian powers, unlike rights, are not correlated with duties; they are correlated with liabilities.
To be sure, the liability might be to be subject to a duty, but to be liable to be put under a duty to obey should not be confused with being under a duty to obey see also Perry on this distinction. The argument highlights what today is sometimes called the subjection problem Perry : how can autonomous individuals be under a general—content-independent—obligation to subject their will to the will of someone else?
Wolff argues that because there cannot be such a general obligation to obey the state, states are necessarily illegitimate. Edmundson has a first response to the anarchist challenge. He argues that while legitimacy establishes a justification for the state to issue directives, it does not create even a prima facie duty to obey its commands.
He claims that the moral duty to obey the commands of legitimate political authority arises only if additional conditions are met. Simmons has a different response to Wolff.
Simmons draws a distinction between the moral justification of states and the political legitimacy of a particular, historically realized, state and its directives. If it can successfully be shown that having a state is morally better than not having a state Simmons , the state is justified. But moral justification is only necessary, not sufficient, for political legitimacy, according to Simmons.
The reason is that our moral obligations are to everyone, including citizens of other states, not to the particular state we live in. While there is no general moral duty to obey the particular state we live in, we may have a political obligation to obey if we have given our prior consent to this state. The absence of a general moral duty to obey the state thus does not imply that all states are necessarily illegitimate Simmons Insofar as legitimacy, understood normatively, defines which political institutions and which decisions made within them are acceptable, and, in some cases, what kind of obligations people who are governed by these institutions incur, there is the question what grounds this normativity.
This section briefly reviews different accounts that have been given of the sources of legitimacy. While there is a strong voluntarist line of thought in Christian political philosophy, it was in the 17 th century that consent came to be seen as the main source of political legitimacy. The works of Hugo Grotius, Hobbes, and Samuel Pufendorf tend to be seen as the main turning point that eventually led to the replacement of natural law and divine authority theories of legitimacy see Schneewind ; Hampton Raz helpfully distinguishes among three ways in which the relation between consent and legitimate political authority may be understood : i consent of those governed is a necessary condition for the legitimacy of political authority; ii consent is not directly a condition for legitimacy, but the conditions for the legitimacy of authority are such that only political authority that enjoys the consent of those governed can meet them; iii the conditions of legitimate political authority are such that those governed by that authority are under an obligation to consent.
Locke and his contemporary followers such as Nozick or Simmons , but also Rousseau and his followers defend a version of i —the most typical form that consent theories take. Greene defends a version of this view she calls the quality consent view.
Versions of ii appeal to those who reject actual consent as a basis for legitimacy, as they only regard consent given under ideal conditions as binding. Theories of hypothetical consent, such as those articulated by Kant or Rawls, fall into this category. Such theories view political authority as legitimate only if those governed would consent under certain ideal conditions cf. David Estlund ff defends a version of hypothetical consent theory that matches category iii.
Authority, in this view, may thus be justified without actual consent. Estlund defines authority as the moral power to require action.
Estlund uses normative consent theory as the basis for an account of democratic legitimacy, understood as the permissibility of using coercion to enforce authority. Although consent theory has been dominating for a long time, there are many well-known objections to it. As mentioned in section 2. Other objections, especially to Lockean versions, are about as old as consent theory itself.
The attempt to legitimize political authority via consent is thus, at best, wishful thinking Wellman What is worse, it may obscure problematic structures of subordination Pateman In the utilitarian view, legitimate political authority should be grounded on the principle of utility.
This conception of legitimacy is necessarily a moralized one: the legitimacy of political authority depends on what morality requires. Christian Thomasius, a student of Pufendorf and contemporary of Locke, may be seen as a precursor of the utilitarian approach to political legitimacy, as he rejected voluntarism and endorsed the idea that political legitimacy depends on principles of rational prudence instead Schneewind ; Barnard Where Thomasius differs from the utilitarians, however, is in his attempt to identify a distinctively political—not moral or legal—source of legitimacy.
By thus distinguishing legitimacy from legality and justice, Thomasius adopted an approach that was considerably ahead of his time. Jeremy Bentham rejects the Hobbesian idea that political authority is created by a social contract. Political legitimacy addresses the question of why the laws of the United States apply to Americans and not to Iraqis.
Or, in the context of Skip to main content Skip to table of contents. This service is more advanced with JavaScript available. Encyclopedia of Global Justice Edition. Editors: Deen K. Contents Search. Legitimacy, in the end, depends on the beliefs held by the audience. But the pervasiveness of legitimation claims is an indication that many groups recognize the political power of legitimacy claims and of legitimation.
Separatist movements often strive to legitimize their claims to self-determination and in this behavior we can see these legitimation strategies in action. For example, it is common for groups to claim that their incorporation into the existing state was fundamentally unjust and that therefore their claims to independence should be seen favorably.
Whether the international community ultimately agrees with their claims is not directly a product of the success of these legitimation strategies, but the pervasiveness of legitimation claims is an indication that many groups believe that legitimation is worthwhile.
The objective approach is inspired by normative political theory and seeks to identify normatively acceptable structures of rule. The objective approach is best understood as being about strategies of legitimation rather than about legitimacy itself. Legitimacy should also be distinguished from legality. Legality may be used as an argument for legitimation, but the connection is not necessarily in this direction. Questions of legitimacy are distinct from questions of legality.
Legitimacy, in this sense, is not an inherently conservative concept. For example, the bombing of Kosovo by NATO in defense of humanitarian goals has frequently been described as illegal because it was not approved by the UN Security Council but legitimate because it pursued a worthwhile goal using proportionate means.
Legitimacy is a belief, held by individuals, about the rightfulness of a rule or ruler. It has collective effects when it is widely shared in a society.
In domestic political life, these effects may include a stable social order that appears consensual. In international political life, the effects of collectively held legitimated rules include social order but also implies the end of international anarchy.
In international political life, the effects of collectively held legitimated rules include social order but also perhaps the end of international anarchy. Buchanan, Allen. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Flathman, Richard E. Goodin and Philip Pettit eds. A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy. Cambridge MA: Blackwell. Gaventa, John. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Hardin, Russell. Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Hesli, Vicki L. Reisinger, and Arthur H. Tyler, Tom. Why People Obey the Law. New Haven: Yale University Press. Tyler, Tom R. Jost and Brenda Major eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, Max. Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Further Reading Baer, Josette. Assessing the Legitimacy of Secession.
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