Political Legitimacy beyond Weber

An Analytical Framework

Benno Netelenbos

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137551115
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137551122
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Legitimacy is an essential concept in politics. But what is it? This book seeks to answer this question through adopting Weber's sociological approach to legitimacy. Weber argues that we should not only understand legitimacy from the perspective of the political order, but that we should also look at its subjective meaning. If this approach seems to have fallen into discredit since Weber formulated it almost a century ago, Netelenbos argues that we need to bring back the subjective into political sociology and theory.

Political Legitimacy beyond Weber argues that contemporary politics in late-modern society cannot merely be understood in terms of legitimate domination or formal bureaucratic organisation. Politics is also about strategic conflict, coordination and argumentation. Based upon these different conceptualisations of politics and by critically evaluating some of the most leading sociologies, Netelenbos presents four analytical perspectives of political legitimacy. Providing crucial insights into the multiple dimensions of political legitimacy, this will be an essential tool for both empirical and normative research.

© The Author(s) 2016

Benno NetelenbosPolitical Legitimacy beyond Weber10.1057/978-1-137-55112-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Benno Netelenbos¹

(1)

Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

End Abstract

Political legitimacy is without a doubt one of the principal concepts in political theory, political philosophy, and political sociology, and maybe in the social sciences in general. Furthermore, it is not just of theoretical or scientific interest. Legitimacy is first and foremost a political interest. Politicians and authorities are constantly trying to legitimise their decisions and actions or the structures of political power in general. If successful, legitimacy assures that political rule is more than merely the raw power of coercion or the strategic force of inducement. It is safe to say that, without an understanding of political legitimacy, we cannot understand politics and its dynamics. It is therefore surprising that relatively little attention has been paid to political legitimacy as an inherently empirical phenomenon. This must be understood carefully, as there are lots of empirical research and theory on political legitimacy. However, most of this work rests upon normative conceptions of legitimacy, especially on democratic values or liberal theories of justice. I do not want to claim that normative theory and normatively inspired empirical analyses are unimportant. But as Shapiro already argued, ‘Speculation about what ought to be is likely to be more useful when informed by relevant knowledge of what is feasible’ (2003:2). The goal of this book is therefore to explore how we can understand political legitimacy as a genuine empirical phenomenon.

This is no easy task. We might question whether the distinction between the normative and empirical is feasible at all. And even if an empirical approach is feasible, as I want to argue, it leads to the difficult question of how to conceptualise political legitimacy in the first place. The most famous answer to the latter question is provided by Max Weber. Weber tries to understand society and politics from the interrelation between objective and subjective meanings. This means that to study political legitimacy is to study the objective structures of the political order and its institutionalised claims of legitimacy. But importantly, it also means that we need to study how these structures and claims are subjectively interpreted and meaningful for the actors involved. Legitimacy, for Weber, is a social fact of the political structure itself—it is socially valid—and on the other hand, it concerns a belief in this fact—it is subjectively valid.

Political sociology and theory after Weber, however, have consequently moved towards an objective or system perspective of political legitimacy, in which the subjective hardly plays a role at all. This, of course, has to do with the demise of action theory in sociology. Objective political structures and claims of legitimacy obviously matter for how politics is organised and how it structures political action. But political action, from obedience to protest, from decision-making to mobilisation, can hardly be understood without paying attention to subjective orientations, interpretations, and meanings. This, it seems to me, is the most important lesson we should learn from Weber. Legitimacy should not just be understood from the perspective of ‘the giver of commands’ or as a social fact of political systems. We need to bring back the subjective into sociology. We need to understand political legitimacy from the relation between objective and subjective validity. In the most general sense, then, we can conceptualise political legitimacy as a subjective normative agreement with the objective structures and processes of politics.

In this book, I want to adopt this Weberian conception of political legitimacy and social action in general, because it is most comprehensive. It allows us to understand politics in terms of structure and organisation, in terms of system theory, without losing sight of politics as subjectively meaningful, in terms of action theory. If these two perspectives have gone their separate ways in sociology—indeed, are often perceived as an unbridgeable divide—I think Weber’s strength is that he combines them, giving him a keen eye for the complexities of society and politics. Indeed, it helps us to understand and study politics beyond the grand theories of modernity, history, and society in its totality, and to descend into the complexities of the politics of everyday life.

However, I also want to move beyond Weber’s political sociology. Weber defines legitimate politics solely in terms of legitimate domination, in terms of hierarchically institutionalised relationships of command and obedience. Of course, Weber is right. Politics is about the organisation of legitimate domination. The reason Weber defines the nature of politics in terms of domination, however, is because the question of legitimacy is fused with the question of political stability. This fusion has a long tradition and is still very common. From this position, Weber’s quest is to explain why subordinates feel an ‘inner-sanctioned duty’ to obey their superiors. Such subjective feelings, such subjective validation of the objective right to rule, explain the stability of a political system, as it is freed from the ineffectiveness of force and violence or the contingency of interests and inducements. Although not untrue, this relation between stability and legitimacy is also overdrawn. There are many ways to explain social and political stability, of which legitimacy is merely one answer. In this book, I want to claim that we need to let go of this traditional link between legitimacy and order. Freeing the question of legitimacy from the question of order allows us to have a broader perspective on both politics and legitimacy.

If we let go of this preoccupation with social and political stability, we can easily perceive that politics consists of much more than merely relations of legitimate domination. Indeed, beyond the question of legitimacy, Weber was well aware of this fact. In addition to domination, I want to argue, politics is at least also about strategic conflict, about social coordination, and about argumentation. These are forms of politics that cannot be contained or grasped by solely looking at the formal organisation of politics. The main argument of the book, then, is that depending on how we conceptualise politics we can understand and analyse political legitimacy differently. As such, this book will provide four analytical perspectives on how to approach political legitimacy and legitimation processes, where political legitimacy is defined as subjective normative agreement with objective politics, understood respectively as domination, strategic conflict, coordination, and argumentation.

In effect, I accept Weber’s crucial and important insights on legitimacy, but try to broaden his work to make it more appropriate for contemporary politics and the complexities of late-modern society. If Weber was primarily interested and intrigued by the rise of the modern state and the bureaucratic machine, present-day politics can hardly just be understood in terms of dutiful citizens or bureaucratic organisation directly intervening in society. Politics today is more complex, fluid, and multifaceted, with more emphasis on processes than on structure, and more room for indeterminacy, vulnerability, and ambiguity. Defining politics more broadly and beyond formal organisation promises a more mobile and open understanding of political legitimacy more attuned to today’s political questions and realities. I hope that this book contributes to a revaluation of the viability of Weber’s approach, by making his work relevant for the twenty-first century.

Before we can really address political legitimacy in relation to domination, conflict, coordination, and argumentation, it seems necessary to address some of the more general problems that were already raised in these first paragraphs. First, is a genuine empirical approach to political legitimacy possible? Second, why is this combination of the subjective and objective the best way to approach political legitimacy, even if we are not primarily interested in the problem of order? It seems prudent to briefly discuss the two main sociological traditions addressing the problem of legitimacy and the problem of order, both present in Weber’s work, and how letting go of the problem of order enriches our understanding of politics and legitimacy. Finally, I will end this chapter with a short description of the subsequent chapters.

1.1 Normative and Empirical Approaches

It is important to appreciate the distinction between normative and empirical approaches to political legitimacy. This distinction seems clear enough, as normative theory tells us how politics ought to be, while empirical theory tells us how politics is. Unfortunately, things do get complicated, as political legitimacy carries an inherent normative quality itself. Indeed, this normative quality is the primary reason why the distinction between normative and empirical theory is often disputed, denied, or unperceived. The normative philosopher will say, ‘my theory tells you when politics is legitimate’, and, as such, it is also empirical. And, vice versa, the critical post-positivist will tell the empirical sociologist, ‘What you define as legitimacy is a valued construct’, and, as such, empirical theory is also normative. These are sticky problems! Problems that explain the paramount confusion that arises as soon as we start talking about political legitimacy in the social sciences.

We should not throw away the valuable distinction between normative and empirical approaches. The defining characteristic of normative theory is that it makes value judgements; judgements about right and wrong, just and unjust, and also about legitimacy and illegitimacy. Legitimacy, in this sense, is a value judgement about political orders and relations made by the scholar. So, for example, a normative theory might argue that democratic values are the moral foundation of legitimate politics, and with this set of values subsequently evaluate existing political organisations on their degree of democratic legitimacy. Although this latter step demands empirical research, it is still inherently a normative approach. We might criticise some decision-making process for not being transparent or inclusive enough, but it does not erase the underlying value judgement of what counts as a morally defensible account of legitimate politics. Much of what passes as empirical theory on political legitimacy is actually crypto-normative, in the sense that value judgements underlying empirical research are not thematised but unproblematically assumed.

However, the researcher in democratic theory might pose a counterargument. It is not the researcher who is necessarily making value judgements about democratic values, but these values are socially accepted by the actors involved. Indeed, democracy is in most Western modern states the publically confessed creed. Showing, then, that empirical politics suffers from a lack of transparency or accountability is not so much a normative value judgement on the part of the researcher but a logical inference of what political actors themselves would agree with. The researcher, then, speaks on behalf of the indigenous democratic people. However, ‘would agree with’ often implicitly turns into ‘should agree with’. The reason for this slippery slope into the murky waters of crypto-normativism is the lack of sensitivity for empirical complexity. Not only are other normative attachments to politics ignored, politics itself is all too often simplified to fit the normative model. So, even when crypto-normativism is prevented, the reliance on normative models of politics often leads to pseudo-empirical research. Of course, there is nothing wrong with normative theory! But good normative theory, I would claim, depends on good empirical theory. If we want to describe and explain politics in its historical context, we need to avoid both crypto-normative and pseudo-empirical claims. This calls for a genuine empirical approach, whose defining character is the avoidance of making value judgements. It tries to understand political legitimacy as an empirical phenomenon.

There are, however, two issues that must be addressed for this empirical approach to be viable. First, describing the world ‘as it is’ does not necessarily demand some archaic positivistic account claiming it is possible to understand the world objectively ‘from a point of nowhere’. Scientific action is itself structured by norms and values, especially by epistemic values such as coherency, simplicity, plausibility, or beauty (Putnam 2002:31). Science, it is safe to say, is historically situated. There is no such thing as a non-value-loaded observation. The positivist ideal of a value-free science geared towards facts separated from values is a difficult position to defend. However, and this is extremely important, the fact that all theory is valued does not mean that all theory contains value judgements. Or, to put it differently, that the fact/value dichotomy is problematic does not mean that we cannot differentiate between normative and empirical theory. But this might not be so obvious for the critical theorist. When empirical theory claims, for example, that an actor is a criminal, it is an implicit normative claim that we ought to consider him a criminal. Indeed, what we define to be a criminal is not some objective category, it is valued, socially constructed, historically situated, etcetera. But if our definitions are valued constructs, then any claim about the world, as it is, is also an inherently normative claim. As such, the difference between empirical and normative claims or theories collapses.

To rescue the difference between normative and empirical theory, we have to reconsider the opposition we are discussing. If the basis of the distinction concerns the difference between is and ought, Sein und Sollen, we must understand what this really means. Luhmann explains that the opposite of normative expectations in ordinary life are not so much ‘empirical’ or ‘factual’ but cognitive expectations (Luhmann 1975). The difference becomes clear if our expectations are disappointed, that is, if things turn out to be different than we expected. We either react to such disappointment by adjusting our expectations, or we counterfactually hold on to our expectations. We either learn and adjust or we refuse to learn as reality ought to be different. It does not matter whether our expectations and observations are ‘valued’, what matters is the difference between learning and not-learning, adjusting expectations in relation to factual experience or holding on to them counterfactually. This is the fundamental difference between normative and empirical theory. Empirical theory adjusts its claims to ‘experiences’, ‘observation’, ‘facts’, that is, it is geared towards learning, whereas normative theory does not, as it counterfactually holds on to how things ought to be, despite the experienced reality. Empirical and normative theory, to sum up, have a different relation with experienced facts, however valued. The epistemic fact–value problematic, then, does not undermine this different ontological relation with reality. Sure, whether science as an institutionalised practice really upholds this differentiation, whether science really learns, is a different matter. But there is a difference between the problematic goal of ‘value-free’ science and the defensible goal of a ‘value judgement-free’ science.

Although I suspect that most social scientists would agree with rescuing empirical theory from unhelpful postmodern claims that all theory is inherently normative, and may be surprised by the laborious argument to defend it, when it comes to political legitimacy as an empirical phenomenon, the debate often becomes muddy. Why is it that one can relatively easily claim to pursue an empirical theory of political power, for example, but that it is problematic when one claims to pursue an empirical theory of political legitimacy? The reason is not, it seems, that political power is such a simple phenomenon—we all know how contested and multidimensional theories of power are—but that political legitimacy is an inherently normative phenomenon. It intrinsically concerns value judgements. But if we can approach value judgements as any other empirical phenomenon, this should not be an issue at all. So, the question is, can we? Of course, we can. We can describe which value judgements actors make in social and political life, and we might even try to explain how, why, and when they do so. So, the sheer fact that political legitimacy is a normative phenomenon does not bar an empirical approach.

1.2 Two Sociological Traditions on Legitimacy an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Politics as Domination
• 3. Politics as Conflict
• 4. Politics as Coordination
• 5. Politics as Argumentation
• 6. Conclusion
• Backmatter