Principle Of Legitimacy Research Articles

Political Disagreement, Legitimacy, and Civility

For many contemporary liberal political philosophers the appropriate response to the facts of pluralism is the requirement of public reasonableness, namely that individuals should be able to offer to their fellow citizens reasons for their political actions that can generally be accepted. This article finds wanting two possible arguments for such a requirement: one from a liberal principle of legitimacy and the other from a natural duty of political civility. A respect in which conversational restraint in the face of political agreement involves incivility is sketched.The proceduralist view which commends substantive disagreement within agreement on procedures is briefly outlined, as is the possible role for civic virtue on this view.

A Critical Guide to Knowledge Society Newspeak: Or, How Not to Take the Great Leap Backward

The advent of the `knowledge society' appears so fascinating to social theorists because the theorists themselves have been finally incorporated into the capitalist mode of production. In postmodern societies, knowledge itself becomes a commodity subject to market forces, rather than an overarching principle of rationalization and legitimation. The article critically surveys the clearest indications of this transition: the requirement of credentials for employment, the development of computerized expert systems and the expansion of intellectual property legislation. Together these trends point to the rise of `knowledge management', which treats knowledge as raw material that needs to be cultivated and pruned, an idea that runs counter to most academic thinking on the nature of knowledge from philosophy to economics. A sign of these changing times is the designation of universities by knowledge managers as `dumb organizations' that mindlessly produce knowledge without any clear organizational goals. This leads the author to revisit the three ways of defining the value of goods in classical political economy - rent, labour, profit - as a foundation for recovering knowledge-producing institutions from the knowledge managers and knowledge society theorists.

Autorégulation du travail et division sociale : observation dans une aluminerie québécoise

This case study of a modern aluminum smelter in Quebec raises questions about the paradoxical coexistence observed between a strong degree of self-regulation by wage-earners (who assume the exigencies related to efficiency and production) and the maintenance of a distance between the line and supervision (as workers set themselves apart from management by affirming their solidarity and union affiliations). Approaches to this phenomenon in terms of a fusion of identities or, on the contrary, of social domination are unable to explain why wage-earners are actively involved in their work despite an ever present social division. To understand this, the employment relationship and the three principles of legitimacy underlying it are analyzed. Workers use the principle of fairness to assert a group claim that “all are equal”. A principle of efficiency legitimates the capacity of wage-earners to assume roles in production independent of supervisors. And a principle of “independence” recognizes and reinforces the division of labor and preserves the positions and contributions of all.

Distinkt, aber nicht illegitim

Abstract The author examines three models of protestant ethics (St. Hauerwas, E. Herms, J. Fischer) asking the following questions: how do they conceive the distinctive character of the christian ethos, how do they understand the relationship between christian ethos and public sphere and are they capable of refusing the liberal demand for self-restriction. All of these models can be interpreted as attempts to describe the distinctive feature of the christian ethos as something which is an essential element all moralities have in common. Although the autor regards the intuist model as the most plausible, he argues that it is not able to reject the liberal demand for self-restriction. Therefore, this challenge can be met only by demonstrating that the restriction of religious and other comprehensive doctrines does not necessarily follow from the liberal principle of legitimacy. The author outlines how this can done be done.

Justifier ses compétences : un réflexe de défense professionnelle des inspecteurs des enfants assistés à la fin du XIX e siècle

In the late 19th century, the inspectors of children placed in custody formed a professional identity in reaction to criticisms. Since the press had exposed the situation of children in the custody of peasant families, the inspectors were forced to develop a professional rhetoric for publicly accounting for their principles and regulations; the arguments and vocabulary used to do this are analyzed. This public quarrel turned this occupation into a ‘profession’ with a different basis from the philanthropic values that had prevailed till then. Inspectors gradually distanced themselves from charitable organizations and from their legal role as they discovered the interests and principles of legitimacy that they held in common.

Contractualism and Global Economic Justice

This article examines Rawls's and Scanlon's surprisingly undemanding contractualist accounts of global moral principles. Scanlon's Principle of Rescue requires too little of the world's rich unless the causal links between them and the poor are unreliable. Rawls's principle of legitimacy leads him to theorize in terms of a law of peoples instead of persons, and his conception of a people leads him to spurn global distributive equality. Rawls's approach has advantages over the cosmopolitan egalitarianism of Beitz and Pogge. But it cannot generate principles to regulate the entire global economic order. The article proposes a new cosmopolitan economic original position argument to make up for this lack in Rawls's Law of Peoples.

Class Action Accountability: Reconciling Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in Representative Litigation

This paper assesses the prospects for meaningful reform of the class action after Amchem Products v. Windsor and Ortiz v. Fibreboard Corp. It reads these decisions as viewing "class cohesion" as the essential rationale that legitimizes representative litigation. Although it agrees that a legitimacy principle must underlie representative litigation, it doubts that "class cohesion" can bear that weight, either as a theory of political representation or as an economic solution for the agency cost and collective action problems in representative litigation. Instead, using the familiar terminology of "exit," "voice" and "loyalty," it suggests that "exit" should prove a superior remedy to voice, and can be implemented through procedures that use exit (much like the appraisal remedy in corporate law) to discipline unfaithful fiduciaries. More generally, it argues that the same accountability mechanisms that work in the field of corporate governance should work in this context as well. Because Amchem and Ortiz may be read to require overly rigorous procedural requirements that could lead to what this article terms the "Balkanization" of the class action, this article further suggests that "exit" should sometimes constitute a functional substitute for "voice" or "loyalty." As a remedy, "exit" can be structured so as to maximize individual choice and promote competition between non-overlapping classes. Thus,the benefits of competition can be realized without increasing the the risk of collusion or a "reverse auction." On the normative level, a choice must be made between viewing the class as an entity and viewing it as an aggregation of individuals. This article argues for the latter view and posits that the basic fiduciary duty of the counsel in representative litigation should be to protect client autonomy.

Science et sublimation de l'État

Science and sublimation of the State. The bureaucratization of the modern European monarchies and the concomitant emergence of a "science of the State" resulted in the growing autonomy of the administrator, and ultimately threw into question the very principles of the legitimacy of royalty. Can comparable processes be detected in the history of imperial China ? The present article focuses on the last centuries of this history (roughly contemporary with those of modern Europe) and attempts to give some idea of the complex relationship between a dynastic power placing greater-than-ever emphasis on the religious foundations of its legitimacy and a bureaucracy in which power and knowledge are divided among numerous levels and ranks. The ultimate science of the State was knowledge of the Classics, which were consulted on the principles of the Emperor's legitimacy as well as the values that should guide the administration placed at his service. Very early on, the scholar-civil servants considered themselves as the depositaries of this science : in certain circumstances, they did not hesitate to oppose the proponents of dynasty. Furthermore, the growth of the society and that, correlative, of the State over the last millennium had led to the development of an extremely complex machinery of laws and regulations, which constituted another type of "science" vulnerable to being taken over by lower-ranking specialists denounced as ideologically unqualified. Finally, the many procedures and practices not sanctioned by the texts but without which the State would be unable to function partake of a "behind-the-scenes science" disparaged but universally practiced. Adding together the different levels produces a "science of the State" that largely eluded control of the imperial power. From the end of the 16th century, one sees the emergence of a professional elite of model administrators seeking to combine the ethical and technical dimensions of this fragmented knowledge so as to make it both more workable and respectable. Their loudly proclaimed objective was to serve the people (the idea of nation appeared only at the very end of the period) ; the notion of serving the dynastic institution was relegated to a de facto if not openly marginal position.

Fragments of Nationalism in Troilus and Cressida

L ITERARY CRITICS LARGELY AGREE that Shakespeare's history plays raised troubling questions about who qualified as a member of the national community.1 Problematic cases include: the Scots, the Welsh, and the Irish; bastards; ethnic halfbreeds; foreign brides; women generally; and sometimes all non-aristocrats. Still, though, despite these questions and anxieties, Shakespeare's tetralogies and the other English history plays move toward closures in which the nation heals and the dream of community reasserts its claim. Troilus and Cressida explores a more pessimistic political argument. If Shakespeare's histories maintain an investment in some idea of national community, Troilus and Cressida works programmatically to reveal the nation as a collection of fictions. Where the histories construct genealogies for England, projecting a new social formation backward into the past, Troilus and Cressida attacks the very idea of genealogy. In King John the bastard Faulconbridge represents the real England: he embodies the principle of legitimacy in all but the most literal sense. In Troilus and Cressida, on the other hand, the bastard Thersites speaks from a cosmopolitan, extranational perspective. During the climactic battle he cheers alter-

Extension to linear dynamics for hybrid stress finite element formulation based on additional displacements

Based upon legitimate variational principles, one microscopic-macroscopic finite element formulation for linear dynamics is presented by Hybrid Stress Finite Element Method. The microscopic application of Geometric Perturbation introduced by Pian and the introduction of infinitesimal limit core element (Baby Element) have been consistently combined according to the flexible and inherent interpretation of the legitimate variational principles initially originated by Pian and Tong. The conceptual development based upon Hybrid Finite Element Method is extended to linear dynamics with the introduction of physically meaningful higher modes.

The altered state and the state of nature—the French Revolution and international politics

The case of the French Revolution supports the proposition that principles of political legitimacy which shape state identities are linked to domestic social structures, and help determine the resources states mobilize in international competition. To the degree that they are shared across states, legitimacy principles also shape international society. The enactment of a deviant principle of legitimacy by a major power will have systemic consequences because it undermines the existing rules of the game; it may have transformative effects if the efficacy of the new principle is demonstrated in competition. Closer attention should be paid to the complex manner in which new principles interact with existing rules of international society.

Hybrid stress finite element formulation based on additional internal displacements – application of microscopic geometric perturbation and extension to linear dynamics

Based on the variational principle for hybrid stress finite element method, the assumed stress distribution can be determined through a variational process which includes a microscopic geometric perturbation. An interpretation of such geometric perturbation is discussed. For the creation of, what is called, hyper-bioelement and for the purpose of maintaining invariance, tensor notations of the physical quantities are represented by the use of covariant and contravariant basis vectors of the natural coordinate system. This process is illustrated by a simple 4-node plane element. Furthermore, based on the legitimate variational principle for linear dynamics and the presently proposed method to choose the assumed stress distribution, the finite element formulation different from the ordinary formula is advocated.

Human rights, participatory communication and cultural freedom in a global perspective

There is evolving in our time a global civic culture, a culture which contains further elements to be incorporated in a new global ethics. The idea of human rights, the principle of democratic legitimacy, public accountability, and the emerging ethos of evidence and proof are the prime candidates for consideration… Today, the idea of human rights, though still challenged by recalcitrant governments. is a firmly entrenched standard of political conduct and will have to be a corner-stone of any global ethics. Javier Pérez de Cuellar (1995, pp. 36–37)

Benthamism in the Countryside: The Architecture of Rural Space, 1900–1930

Historians of state formation have increasingly recognized what Foucault has described as the ‘dark side’ of the enlightenment institutional principles of representation, transparency and accountability and explored the parallel principles of legitimation, surveillance and discipline. In this paper, I pursue these themes in a neglected area, the institutional architecture of rural space. I do so by examining ideologies for rural planning in western Canada and the American midwest in the early twentieth century. These ideologies were linked to state projects, and found institutional expression in Canada in the ‘town planning movement’ attached to municipal and provincial planning offices, and in the United States in agricultural extension services and the ‘county agent’ system—the local ‘inspectorate’ of the Federal Department of Agriculture. The aim was a restructuring of rural space in the interests of rationalizing agricultural production and controlling large populations of settlers, recently displaced, and disturbingly ‘isolated’ and inaccessible in the vast spaces of the great plains. Despite common aims, American and Canadian reformers adopted fundamentally different principles of spatial design. Town planners inherited the European assumption that community networks and class relations were embedded in particular spatial arrangements, so that rural reform required re‐drawing the boundaries of fields and settlements. As early as 1915, American reformers developed the idea that networks of sociability and domination were defined first by abstract structures, formal organizations and the cash nexus, and could, using modern media of communication, be ‘disembedded’ from particular locales and distributed spatially.

The Macedonian Conflict. Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World (review)

Reviewed by: The Macedonian Conflict. Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World Roger Just Loring M. Danforth, The Macedonian Conflict. Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1995. Pp. xvi + 273. 17 illustrations and 7 maps. $29.95 cloth. In 1983 Ernest Gellner could still argue, in Nations and Nationalism, that we live in a world of nationalism, a world in which the congruence of “nation” (people) and “state” (political structure) is so ingrained that we take it as an axiomatic principle of political legitimacy. Even by then, however, it might have been more accurate to suggest, as many scholars now do, that we live in a world of “ethnicity,” a world in which every “people,” every ethnic group, strives to wrest some degree of autonomy or recognition from the state or, more significantly, in defiance of the state. “Ethnicity” and “nationalism” are thus pitted against each other, but they are in fact the products of a remarkably similar process, and in The Macedonian Conflict. Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World, Loring M. Danforth presents us with a superb case study both of the conflict between nationalism and ethnic aspirations and of the curious parallelisms in their development. Professor Danforth’s book is, however, more than a scholarly work of anthropology and contemporary history. It is a level-headed, humane, and very timely political intervention in a quarrel that continually threatens to become more than a war of words. For that reason Danforth is unlikely to win many friends among partisans of either side; nevertheless, he must surely win the respect not only of those who claim to be “dispassionate” but also of those who are capable of comprehending the social and historical factors that shape their passions. At least for Europe, nation-states crystallized out of the fragmentation of older, more embracing political forms—the multiethnic, multilinguistic empires of Christendom and Islam in which the political structure (the state) and the nations (peoples) encompassed had no necessary unity. To that extent, nationalism could be viewed as a triumph of localism: a Finland for the Finns, an Italy for the Italians and, of course, a Greece for the Greeks—“national” territories and “national” states liberated from “foreign” rule. But who were the “Finns” or the “Italians” or the “Greeks” who won their sovereignty? For nationalists the answer is self-evident: they were Finns, Italians, and Greeks. The categories are natural kinds. For most social scientists—and, in the present case, for Danforth—such peoples are also historical constructs. In Gellner’s robust argument, it is states that create peoples, not peoples states; but even if, as Danforth suggests, Gellner’s formulation is too simple, it is nevertheless the case that nationalism’s nineteenth-century triumph itself entailed a suppression of other forms of [End Page 355] localism, since the nation-state’s existence, its very rationale, demanded that the populations of a Finland or an Italy or a Greece be “Finnish” or “Italian” or “Greek.” National homogenization being the price of national independence, nation-states had to transform themselves into the “natural” (national) unities they claimed to be. In this game there were winners and losers. The “Greeks” achieved their state, but the Vlachs, Pomaks, and Macedonians did not (as elsewhere the Basques, Catalans, and Bretons did not). The choice for such “residual” peoples was to assimilate, to become Greek—or, importantly, to “discover” that they were “Greek” (or “Spanish” or “French”)—or else to bide their time. Ethnicity thus starts where nationalism left off: a second round of frag-mentation, a second round of claims to recognition and to independence of a sort, but under somewhat different circumstances. Macedonia, the geographical area, was partitioned after 1913 among three newly formed nation-states (Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria), all of which had won their territories from the Ottoman Empire in the name of their peoples. Those who now claim a Macedonian identity—as distinct from a Greek-Macedonian, a Bulgarian, or a Serbian identity—do not, therefore, contend with the “foreign” and therefore (in contemporary terms) clearly “illegitimate” rule of an empire but, on the contrary, with the rule of nation-states whose own legitimacy rests precisely...

Kritische Anmerkungen zu Ernst Tugendhals Konzept der Legitimität

Abstract According to Tugendhat's moral theory of legitimation the equal consideration of the interests of all is required. Tugendhat claims that this concept is the only one remaining as traditional forms of justification are no longer available. The author argues that Tugendhat's theory must fail because he tries to realize two contradictory aims: on the one band that bis principle of legitimation should not to be reduced to individual interests; on the other band that it should be reached without any aprioristic presuppositions.

Principles of legitimation in educational discourses in Iceland and the production of progress

On the one hand this paper is an exploration of how suitable the theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault are to explain educational reform. At another level, the paper tells a story of educational reform in Iceland in the last 25 years ‐ through the Bourdieuean and Foucauldian lenses. The paper identifies legitimating principles in the discourse on educational reform in Iceland and focuses on the tensions over what counts as capital in teacher education. In short, pedagogy, curriculum theory, educational psychology and other educational sciences signify a discursive pole that is gaining currency at the cost of the capital of the traditional academic disciplines, such as Icelandic, history and biology, which signify the other pole in this spectrum. The paper argues that an epistemology of progress underlying reform often prevents reformers from taking a reflective stance on the historical foundations of their beliefs in educational science; they take for granted that progress and evolution are possible and call for better methods to produce progress.

Uniting the German nation: law, narrative, and historicity

This article analyzes the use of narrative form in law, specifically with reference to conflicts over unification of the German nation. Since the end of the Cold War, local actors have been repositioned in disputes over property, historiography, and penalties for the East German political elite. A just adjudication of these disputes is problematic given that the actors appeal to several different legal registers, each with its own principles of legitimacy derived from peculiar historical circumstances, which are not taken into consideration in the unification process. [Germany, nation, narrative, law, historicity, classification]

Nature's Apportionment and the Open Market: A Promising Solution to the Arab-Israeli Water Conflict

ABSTRACT The populations and consumption levels of countries throughout the Middle East are steadily increasing and, correspondingly, their water demands. Water resources available to most of these countries remain more or less the same, if not being reduced by abusive utilization or pollution. Many now speculate that the region's next war will be fought over water Today's international legislative structure is incapable of solving complex water disputes such as that of the Middle East. However principles of international legitimacy provide the basis for solutions. This paper presents a pragmatic, practical, and dispassionate formula compatible with the principles of international law and legitimacy for dealing with international water resources allocation problems. The presented formula is built around resolving the Middle East's water conflict according to natural apportionment of resources and the open market approach.

Recognition of States: A Comment

Legal issues arising from dissolution of states, emergence of new states and recognition of the latter require a thorough understanding of the relevant facts. While it is obvious that any legal discourse must proceed from firm factual foundations, it is necessary to emphasize the importance of the circumstantial dimensions of the issues, given that the views on the pertinent facts usually diverge, at least during the policymaking stage. Assessment of facts is much easier from a historical distance. Nobody questions today the wisdom of recognizing the dissolution of the Spanish colonial empire in Latin America, or the independence of Greece from the Ottoman rule. These events belong to history and have a comfortable place in contemporary textbooks on international law. However, at their time they were among the most controversial political issues of the time and contributed considerably to the collapse of the hitherto prevailing international system which was based on the principles of the Holy Alliance. The principle of legitimacy as understood at that time had to give way to independence of new states. Therefore, it seems necessary to recognize that the 'facts' and 'policy matters' concerning dissolution of states, emergence of new states and recognition of the latter contain more than facts per se: they also contain an important contextual dimension and it is necessary to make an effort to understand it as completely as possible. It is necessary to comprehend the historical context within which they take place, as well as their effect on the functioning of the international system.