II. Toward a Concept of Political Illegitimacy

Abstract

UENTIN SKINNER in his superb recent book made a telling comment on how new concepts enter political discourse: The surest sign that a society has entered into the secure possession of a new concept is that a new vocabulary will be developed, in terms of which the concept can then be publicly articulated and discussed.' Professor Holmes has explained how and why the modern career'of legitimacy as a political concept began. It became a term central to the new political vocabulary developed as the result of the French Revolution, the Terror, the rise and fall of the regime created by Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Bourbon Restoration. As an adjective applied to regimes, the use of legitimate entailed its opposite, illegitimate. When further extended to types of regime, both terms had to be understood and qualified by their relationships to other concepts within the same vocabulary. Of these regimes, the most crucial was the new and then negatively charged type that at first had no one, generally recognized name. This was the regime created by Napoleon after a military coup d'etat, a series of plebiscites that enabled him to represent himself as the embodiment of popular sovereignty and the national will, his consequent consolidation of power at home through perfecting the centralized bureaucracy established by the Ancien Regime and improved by the revolution and, his mobilization of