Idea Of Legitimacy Research Articles

The concept of “popular royalism” in the latest historiography of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Era: pro and contra

In recent years, the concept of “popular royalism” has gained popularity in the historiography of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The author of the article analyses the main tenets and criticisms of this concept based on the writings of the three main theorists, Paul Choplin, Álvaro Paris, and Andoni Artola. The term “popular royalism” appeared as a result of an incomplete discussion about the essence of counter-revolution in European countries in the late 18th – early 19th centuries. According to the authors of the concept, royalist and counter-revolutionary movements were not retrograde in nature and met the actual demands of different layers of society in the situation of civil war. The counter-revolution gave rise to an alternative way of politicization of the masses and contributed to the emergence of new models of their political participation. The royalists monopolised old sources of political legitimacy and adapted familiar discourses and images to new challenges. Drawing on the idea of legitimacy, they put forward a wide range of demands that were not only conservative but also innovative. Nevertheless, specific regional casess, especially from Italian history, show that the cross-class alliances led by the royalists were temporary and unsustainable. These alliances contributed to the Restoration, but only with foreign military intervention. Yet, since the national historiographical traditions are still very stable, the proposed new concept of popular royalist movements requires substantial clarifications, taking into account the specifics of the historical development of different countries and regions.

Political Theology can also be Democratic: On Miguel Vatter's Divine Democracy

Political Theology can also be Democratic:On Miguel Vatter's Divine Democracy Montserrat Herrero (bio) Miguel Vatter. Divine Democracy: Political Theology after Carl Schmitt. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021. 312pp. $34.95 (pb). ISBN: 9780190942366 In Divine Democracy, Miguel Vatter argues for political theology as a way of approaching political theory because our world requires a new understanding [End Page 1152] of the ways religion and politics are intertwined in democracy. Can political theology be democratic? This interrogation is pertinent insofar as the man who coined the term for twentieth-century political theory, Carl Schmitt, seemed to associate it with sovereignism. In fact, the book that inaugurated the discussion on political theology in the twentieth century, Political Theology, was published in Berlin in 1922. Henceforth, many scholars have associated the phrase "political theology" with the advent of National Socialism in Germany. Vatter considers that, while political theology as a research method is still valid, an anti-Schmittian "democratic turn" in its orientation is needed. And this is exactly what he attempts to do in this superb book. This democratic orientation, however, cannot simply consist in being anti-sovereignist, but has to show a positive face. It needs to show how the transposition of certain theological concepts and doctrines can be transferred into the realm of democratic law and politics. In his words: "Christian political theology after Schmitt displaces sovereignty by pivoting on the idea that legitimacy is a function of the political unity of a people achieved through its political representation, as befits its Christological doctrinal structure." (p. 7) In fact, he shows how the concepts of representation, universal human rights, government and public reason, as well as sovereignty, have theological roots. God's presence in the secular world no longer hinges on hierarchical figures as was the case with the Catholic church, the empire or the nation, but now asserts itself through the political practices and institutions of modern democracy. The idea of representation takes on enormous importance in the book. Indeed, the tension between the idea of legitimacy and the idea of representative democracy is the terrain in which political theology operates. One could almost say that the main thesis of the book is that political theology is synonymous with representation, understood as the articulation of popular power, always plural in a unity of action. If there is no articulation or mediation, then we are in the terrain of anarchy, but anarchy does not found community, since it lacks the strength to unify a concrete political order. To demonstrate these theses, the book transits through modern to postmodern political thought. Most of the authors to whom Vatter gives voice are modern, but in each case, he establishes their connections with other postmodern authors. Not all of the authors included can be considered representatives of political theology, rather only a few. Political theology hence is used by Vatter as a method for observing the conceptual drifts of their texts––i.e., to enquiry into the theological provenance of the political concepts used by each author. In any case, the aim of the book is not to determine the authors' thought, but their conceptual derivations in relation to the democratic theological-political possibilities. The first chapter begins by questioning Schmitt's approach to political theology in relation to the concept of sovereignty; he does so in dialogue with Kelsen and Hobbes on the one hand, and Peterson on the other. In this way, Vatter's critique of Schmitt is not a straightforward anti-authoritarian one, but acquires richer nuances. The second chapter uses Eric Voegelin to show the theological-political possibilities of the concept of representation. Through Voegelin, Vatter defends a conception of representation that is not only existential, as in the case of Schmitt's idea of representation, but also symbolic. At the end of the chapter, he discusses the relationship between Voegelin, through [End Page 1153] whom "the Jewish question" is introduced in the book, and Laclau, the theorist of populist reason, a quirky pairing that is nonetheless well argued. By confronting Laclau with a theory of representation, the difference between a representationalist left that is propositional, on whose side we find Laclau and ˇZiˇzek, and...

“To Be Exempted of Any Penalty”: the Idea of Legitimacy in Sergey Muravjev-Apostol’s Ethical System

The article researches ethical ideas of a Decembrists’ leader — Sergey Murav’ev-Apostol. The first thing that is described is his ideas about law and legitimacy as well as about the necessity that the jury to be introduced in Russia and the judges follow the principle of “indulgence, merci and love” as they fulfill their duties. The article is based on the history of major N. S. Borshchev, accused of abuse of authority to be later acquitted by the Commission of the Tribunal presided by S. Murav’ev-Apostol. It is concluded that the case of Borshchev predetermined Murav’ev-Apostol’s exclusive authority among the soldiers and officers. The verdict of the military court on the Borshchov case will be published in the appendix.

Themes from Fallon on Constitutional Theory

Professor Richard Fallon’s Law and Legitimacy in the Supreme Court is a deep, original, and important contribution to constitutional theory. Fallon’s book is extraordinary, ranging across fundamental issues in normative constitutional theory and connecting to important ideas from political philosophy, metaethics, and the philosophy of language. This Essay explores three themes from Fallon and reflects on the significance of Fallon’s work for contemporary constitutional theory. The first theme concerns the idea of constraint by the constitutional text: Fallon develops a challenge to the claim that the legitimacy of judicial review requires that judges be constrained by the constitutional text. Part I of this Essay situates Fallon’s challenge in the context of contemporary originalist constitutional theory. Discussion of the first theme aims to reveal difficulties with Fallon’s claim that the existence of multiple kinds of meaning undermines certain forms of constitutional originalism. The second theme derives from Fallon’s exploration of the foundational role of the idea of reflective equilibrium in normative constitutional theory. Part II of this Essay suggests that the role of constitutional theory requires that reflective equilibrium be reconceptualized in terms of intersubjective agreement among citizens who affirm a plurality of moral, religious, and ideological perspectives: in other words, it is a we and not an I that should aim for a relationship of consistency and mutual support between our considered constitutional judgments. Exploration of the second theme aims to reveal a difficulty with a first-person singular approach to reflective equilibrium. The third theme is prompted by Fallon’s exploration of the idea of legitimacy. Part III of this Essay suggests that constitutional legitimacy has a complex structure, including both multiple dimensions and functions. Investigation of the third theme aims to uncover the ways in which constitutional legitimacy constrains the options available to normative constitutional theory. The three themes are woven together in the final Part of the Essay, which reflects the implications of Fallon’s work for the great debate between originalism and living constitutionalism. Part IV of the Essay suggests the ways in which originalists might respond to Fallon’s important, deep, and learned challenges to the case for constitutional originalism.

Narratives and Normativity: Totalitarianism and Narrative Change in the European Legal Tradition after World War II

After WWII, a new form of Europeanism emerged in legal history that gained momentum from European unification. This article explores the emergence of this new narrative as part of the process of exile from totalitarianism and its connection with the reestablishment of the European intellectual and political order after the war. The purpose is to explore the parallel afterwar processes of narrative and normative change and the influences and connections between them. It focuses on a specific historical case, the turn toward Europe, its legal heritage and human rights in the post-war era writing of legal history, especially in the writings of Paul Koschaker, Franz Wieacker, and Helmut Coing, and its linkages to the simultaneous process of European integration. It explores a new argument about the interlinkage between narrativity and normativity as cognitive processes that rely on the creation and sustaining of belief, and the ideas of legitimacy and identity construction.

Legal Pluralism and the English East India Company in the Straits of Malacca during the Early Nineteenth Century

During the early nineteenth century, the English East India Company (EIC) was in a state of transition in Penang, an island in the Straits of Malacca off the coast of the Malay Peninsula. Although the EIC had established strong ties with merchants based in Penang, they had failed to convince the EIC government in Bengal to invest them with more legal powers. As a result, they could not firmly extend formal jurisdiction over the region. The Anglo-Dutch Treaty (also known as the Treaty of London) that officially cemented EIC legal authority over the Straits of Malacca, was not signed until 1824, bringing the three Straits Settlements of Penang, Malacca, and Singapore under EIC rule officially in 1826. Prior to that, the EIC imposed their ideas of legitimacy on the region via other means, mainly through the co-optation of local individuals of all origins who were identified as politically and economically influential, by granting them EIC military protection, and ease of sailing under English flags. Because co-opted influential individuals could still be a threat to EIC authority in the region, EIC company officials eradicated competing loci of authority by discrediting them in courtroom trials in which they were treated as private individuals. All clients in EIC courts including royal personages in the region were treated like colonial subjects subject to English Common Law. By focusing on a series of trials involving a prominent merchant named Syed Hussain Aideed from 1816 to 1821, this article traces how EIC legal authority became pervasive at the eastern end of the Indian Ocean by the early nineteenth century without actual territorial conquest.

Competing for Victim Status: Northern Muslims and the Ironies of Sri Lanka’s Post-war Transition

The northern Muslims together with all protracted IDPs displaced prior to 2008 became a low priority caseload for return and resettlement assistance in the aftermath of the ‘end’ of the war in Sri Lanka in 2009. Framed in terms of an ethics of ‘greatest need’ connected only to funding availability, all old IDPs lost out in the resettlement process. This paper attempts to decentre this idea of economic limits and humanitarian need by discussing the manner in which such ideas of ‘greatest need’ actually emerge from discourses about victimhood that are part of an ethical humanitarian project to which local politics are irrelevant. This paper will show, however, that these initiatives consistently intersect with local power hierarchies and local ideas of legitimacy and belonging. Therefore, this paper will look at the manner in which the war related victim discourse of international humanitarianism, helped to exacerbate northern Muslim’s own marginality and continued exclusion from the north. This paper will also look at the manner in which victimhood narratives are mobilized in Sri Lanka by electoral politics and displaced IDP activists themselves, and will speculate about the efficacy of the victim identity for political and social transformation during this time of transition in Sri Lanka.

Contributions and Limits of Rortian Pragmatism for Political Agonism

Fil: Penelas, Federico Carlos. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Filosofia y Letras. Instituto de Filosofia ; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata; Argentina

Peter Winch on Political Authority and Political Culture

AbstractPeter Winch, in his political philosophy, wanted to rethink the concepts of political authority, legitimacy and political culture, with a starting point in Wittgensteinian ideas. This essay brings together Winch's thoughts on political authority. Developing insights from Wittgenstein's work on certainty, Winch emphasised the unstated background behind any normative stand concerning authority. Ideas of legitimacy and civil society are formed within historically specific political cultures. In the 1990s, Winch was increasingly inclined to emphasise disagreement, which was related to his developing views on understanding, logic and reasoning. This development is traced, in part, on the basis of unpublished lecture notes.

Mazzini and the making of the republican ideology

This article examines Giuseppe Mazzini's contribution to republicanism envisaged as an ideology and a political program whose aim was the formation of a political party capable of competing in the electoral process of a representative and constitutional government. The central theme is the role of republican ideology before and after Unification. Through an analysis of Mazzini's three great polemical ruptures with liberalism (over the idea of liberty) with class-based socialism (over the idea of solidarity) and with democratic ideology (over the idea of legitimacy), the article seeks to highlight the key components of the ideological identity that Mazzini sought to give first to the republican movement and then to the republican party.

Transnational conceptions of Islamic community: national and religious subjectivities

A conversation with a friend in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in 2007 evoked how much the idea of globalisation has permeated ideas of legitimacy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Almost sharply, this friend said, ‘Don’t forget, the Prophet imagined Islam as global long before anyone was talking about globalisation.’ If being global has become the currency of neoliberal respect, then scholarship on the multiple and frequently religious ways of claiming cosmopolitaneity remains scant. This collection of articles puts transnational conceptions of Islamic community, often referred to as the umma, into conversation with literatures on globalisation and the nation. By attending to the histories, stakes and subjects of claims to national or transnational forms of Islamic identity, we argue that discourses of religious community are constituted by the forms they appear to subvert, particularly the nation-state. This collection showcases case studies from outside Europe, where secular nationalism remains dominant, and from outside the Middle East, where Islam was historically rooted and remains authoritative, potentially decoupling naturalised claims of secularism and nationalism. The study of formerly colonised, globally marginal and/or majority-Muslim contexts suggests that religion, nation and state are not always in dichotomised tension. The idea of a globalised community of economic and cultural exchange, an image that haunts references to globalisation, is itself an invitation to believe, or an act of faith. Jacques Derrida has called this the fiduciary faith of ‘globalatinisation’ (Derrida 1998: 53), the political project of borderless expansion that is constitutively Christian in its imagination of a sphere of ‘‘religion’’, from which all other secular political projects are supposed to separate themselves, while at the same time covertly underpinning them. The imagination involved in the very discourse of globalisation requires envisioning a globe in which national borders enforced by states no longer hold the power they once did. Similarly, appeals to alternative, yet equally global, communities, such as apparently universal religious communities, rest on parallel foundations. However, as scholars of globalisation have argued, no terrain is free of political histories of inequality and imperial exclusions (Appadurai 1996). For many Muslims round the world, an idealised image of Nations and Nationalism 17 (1), 2011, 2–6.

Religious Liberty and the Rawlsian Idea of Legitimacy: The French Laïcité Project between Comprehensive and Political Liberalisms

AbstractKahn has argued that the French Laïcité project has degenerated, in some of its recent incarnations, into an illiberal public commitment to a ‘comprehensive’ doctrine of enlightened or emancipated autonomy. He suggests it can instead be conceived in a Rawlsian sense, a concept of right derived independently of ‘comprehensive’ conceptions of the good—thus, merely an institutional appendage to liberty of conscience, distinct from any deeper social goal. The attempt at separating out ‘political’ and ‘comprehensive’ secularisms is best viewed through the prism of the headscarved school-goer whom the liberal state deems unfree. Can such a state intervene to ensure the autonomy of its child-citizens with regard to comprehensive doctrines, or is this to impose a conception of the emancipated rational life, freely lived? Is this autonomy of conscience distinguishable from an idea of the good life, a merely ‘political’ guarantee of self-determination—or is this distinction even viable? The figure of the headscarved child-citizen ostensibly challenges the Rawlsian assumption that the state’s claim to neutrality between comprehensive doctrines can transcend or stand outside these doctrines, and represent anything other than an ends-oriented project of liberal emancipation. This arises because, on one view, the state must, in order to guarantee schoolchildren freedom to choose between ways of life, paradoxically first impose such a particular conception, of emancipation or rational autonomy. However, this article suggests that despite its ostensible allure, the dualism of ‘political’ and ‘comprehensive’ secularisms is not the best lens through which to critique the French Laïcité project.

Legitimacy through Precaution in European Regulation of GMOs? From the Standpoint of Governance as Analytical Perspective

In this paper I analyse the role that the precautionary principle plays in ensuring legitimacy in the EU authorisation regime for GMOs by using the ‘governance’ perspective as analytical frame. The idea of legitimacy, as embodied in this principle, requires creating a balance between scientific and political legitimacy in the decision-making of authorisation. The current legislative framework, although in principle providing for an all-inclusive network structure, presupposes a narrow ‘sound science’ notion of precaution. It therefore fails to ensure the balance between scientific considerations and ‘other legitimate factors’ such as ethical or socio-economic concerns. Unless a more deliberative approach to precaution is adopted at Community level, a new moratorium on bio-tech products will be the ‘sword of Damocles’ hanging over EU regulation in this area.

Doxa et légitimité

This contribution takes again the rhetorical problem of the doxa to question the semiotic idea of legitimacy. The thesis defended here consists in assessing the rhetorialc character of any speech, and, through it, the statute of doxa understood as base of the social field. From this prospect we postulate a concept of legitimacy at the principle of the semiotic activity. Topics, as center of rhetoric, is consequently proved inseparable from a concept of anthropological acceptability which conditions the meaning as a social value. It results from it a strong thesis on the doxic incarnation of language (in particular verbal) with a redefinition of the statute of meaning from the primacy of ethics.

Aspects of Democratic Performance: Democratic Adherence and Regime Evaluation in Brazil, 2002

Recent comparative studies in diverse national contexts on attitudes and values explaining support to democracy have largely agreed upon identifying a wide array of regime adherent constituencies. Nevertheless, they also stress the fact that remarkable differences between distinct aspects associated with public support and legitimacy in less consolidated democracies might play a crucial role for the whole democratic consolidation process whenever public opinion and mass support to the political system are taken into account. For Rose and Mishler (1999), for example, in spite of the fact that in recently established democracies a usually higher degree of support to the new regime can be verified in view of the previous authoritarian experience, a sustained negative perception of the new regime’s performance, based on the evaluation of successive governments, eventually undermines the support already obtained. Moreover, it suggests, even though as a frail alternative, the possibility of a political throwback. Gunther and Montero (2003), on the other hand, based on data assembled in several Latin American, European and Asian countries, propose conceptual distinctions between the idea of legitimacy or support to democracy and the idea of satisfaction with the democratic regime. On the other hand, however, they point to a similar trend, stressing the importance of attitudinal dimensions that convey mass support to democracy. Norris (1999a,b) points out the prevalence of diversified underlying principles encompassing not only appreciation of democracy by the citizens, but also an increasing criticism towards democratic institutions. That pattern has been observed as much in consolidated democracies as in the so-called ‘semi-democracies’. It displays very distinct results, that is, not only destabilizing effects for the political body, but perhaps also the activation of healthy self-regenerative capabilities among

Deliberative Democracy and Liberal Rights

Many liberals cannot help distrusting deliberative democracy theory. In their view, the theory offers no sufficient guarantee that the outcomes of democratic deliberation will be respectful of individual interests generating what they conceive as basic moral rights. The purpose of this text is to provide one argument showing that liberal rights are sufficiently protected within deliberative democracy theory. The argument does not rest on the idea of moral rights or material justice. It rests on the conditions of legitimate law deliberative democracy theory presupposes, namely, the conditions that make concrete the idea of legitimacy as “actual public justification.”

Legal Pluralism as a Source of Conflict in Multi-Ethnic Societies

This contribution takes the case of a conflict about land to show how opportunities offered by legal pluralism can be used as a political instrument and how this threatens political stability and the practice of democracy. The analysis attempts to show that it is not an extensive legal pluralism in itself which has led to ‘ethnic’ conflict, but the practice of using law as a political instrument. The outline of the ‘ethnic clashes’ of 1991 between Gonja and Nawuri in Northern Ghana takes account of the historical, social and legal context to analyse the structural roots of the conflict and to point to its broader political dimension. It shows how colonial legal concepts of territorial rule and title to land were used by local leaders to deepen and consolidate already unequal inter-group power relations in their favour. It also analyses how these legal changes ‘loaded’ their relationship with a variety of meanings, suggesting in the social domain a relationship between masters and slaves and leading on the political level to an exclusion of Nawuri leaders from modern and hybrid institutions which would otherwise have provided a link to the ‘modern’ administration. The central questions are: Is it inevitable that law in multi-ethnic societies such as Ghana becomes a source of conflict? What role is played by the state? What is the impact of the state’s legal policy? And to what extent can so-called ‘traditional’ law be reformed and rearranged if it is understood as an element of culture? These questions are considered in the light of the perception that an open approach in dealing with a plurality of law is constitutive for a democracy which is guided by the idea of legitimacy and justice.

The Legitimacy of Political Institutions

This paper criticizes the standard view that the legitimacy of a political institution rests on the private convictions of its clients. It shows that these problems derive from a more basic difficulty with the conception of political order upon which the standard idea of legitimacy rests. A revised conception of legitimacy is constructed in which legitimacy becomes a direct property of institutions rather than of individuals. In the process, it is also shown how one might account for important political features of institutionally-relevant behavior without resorting to imputed psychological states.

The Ambivalence of Juridification. On Legitimate Governance in the International Context

The paper argues that the current global market is organized by a system of transnational law whose development is best characterized as ambivalent. On the one side, legal juridification can lead to a hegemonic system of international law that lacks legitimacy, paradoxically creates extralegal spheres, promotes the ‘privatization’ of political areas, and, thereby, reduces the competences of states. On the other side, legal codification can also function as an engine of transnational democratization and as a barrier to an unhampered growth of transnational administrative and executive power. Scholarship on the idea of legitimacy in law and transnational governance in political and legal theory has to reflect these aspects of juridification on a world scale. Most approaches to the issue, however, have serious flaws: they neither offer an adequate empirical diagnosis of the de-embedding of international economic and legal processes, nor do they provide convincing proposals as to how such processes could be domesticated. Against this background, the paper lays out a critical analysis of legal codification processes as well as proposing an account of democratic governance, based on a realistic conception of deliberative democracy.