What Is Legitimacy?

Question

What is legitimacy, and why is it the foundational question of political philosophy? The question arises because every government claims the right to rule, and the legitimacy of that claim determines whether its commands are morally binding.

Quick Answer

Legitimacy is the moral right to rule. A legitimate government has the authority to issue commands and to enforce them, and citizens have a corresponding moral obligation to obey. The concept is distinct from legality: a law can be legal but illegitimate, or legitimate but not yet enacted into law. The question of legitimacy is the question of what justifies political authority. The major theories include: consent (authority is legitimate if it is based on the consent of the governed), procedural legitimacy (authority is legitimate if it follows fair procedures), democratic legitimacy (authority is legitimate if it is based on democratic decision-making), and normative legitimacy (authority is legitimate if it meets certain moral standards).

Historical Wisdom

The consent tradition is the dominant approach to legitimacy in modern political philosophy. Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan grounds legitimacy in the consent of individuals who authorize the sovereign to rule. John Locke's Second Treatise grounds legitimacy in the consent of the governed, but with the crucial addition that the people retain the right to withdraw their consent if the government violates their trust.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract offers a different account: legitimacy rests on the general will, not on individual consent. A law is legitimate if it expresses the general will of the people, not if it has been consented to by each individual.

Max Weber offered a sociological analysis of legitimacy that has been enormously influential. Weber argues that legitimacy is not a normative concept but a descriptive one: a regime is legitimate if people believe it is legitimate. He identifies three sources of this belief: tradition, charisma, and law.

Philosophical Perspectives

Jurgen Habermas's Between Facts and Norms (1992) offers a synthesis of the normative and sociological approaches. Habermas argues that legitimacy in modern democratic societies depends on the quality of public deliberation. A law is legitimate if it is the result of a process of free and reasoned deliberation among equal citizens.

John Rawls's Political Liberalism (1993) offers a different approach. Rawls argues that legitimacy in a pluralistic society depends on the idea of public reason: political decisions must be justifiable to all reasonable citizens in terms they can accept.

Contemporary debates about legitimacy focus on several questions: Is legitimacy a normative concept or a sociological one? Can a regime be legitimate even if it is not democratic? Is legitimacy a matter of procedure or outcome? And what is the relationship between legitimacy and justice?

Lessons From Thinkers

From Hobbes: legitimacy is grounded in consent and the preservation of peace. From Locke: legitimacy is conditional on the protection of rights. From Rousseau: legitimacy rests on the general will, not individual consent. From Weber: legitimacy is, in practice, a matter of belief. From Habermas: legitimacy depends on the quality of democratic deliberation. From Rawls: legitimacy in a pluralistic society requires public reason.

Practical Application

The concept of legitimacy is central to every debate about political authority. When citizens question whether a government has the right to impose a particular law, they are questioning its legitimacy. When the international community debates whether to recognize a government, it is debating its legitimacy. The question — what is legitimacy? — is therefore a practical question about the foundations of political obligation.