Term
Legitimacy
used in 99 texts across the archive
“Now we can speak of something equivalent to “legitimacy,” or the intrinsic relation between ostensive and imperative, as residing in the more specific origin of any community. The communist or liberal or revolutionary or usurpationist origin of the country where you find your obligations, then, cannot be “illegitimate.””
In use
“If indeed my continued Fukuyama-like assertion of the superiority of liberal democracy is correct, then there is no “higher” argument for one side or the other; the very existence of two matched parties suggests that they have equal legitimacy and that that legitimacy is itself the highest political value. The seemingly hypocritical condition of political debate in which the sides contest each other’s legitimacy on an intellectual level while accepting it on a procedural level is the paradoxical foundation of liberal democracy.”
“History, then, has exhausted itself in the antinomic agencies of contemporary liberalism, where the genuinely stripped bare human that can be the only source of legitimacy is nothing but sheer opposition to whatever norms make social functioning possible.”
“But what does the increasing or more intractable inequality have to do with the diminishing legitimacy function of the welfare state—is it that the rich no longer have enough money to support it or the less able are no longer willing to accept the bribe (or have figured out that the bribe will continue even if legitimacy is denied)?”
“Success is only possible if you turn the infiltrators into your tools: speak always and only as if you will only obey the commands of legitimate leaders of legitimate institutions, and you are always simply pointing out that the rate of turnover in terms of legitimacy is accelerating and it can be rather difficult to keep up.”
Key texts