Colossal Bust of Ramses II, The Younger Memnon, British Museum. Photo by Jorge Royan. Bust transported to Dorsett, 1821. The inspiration for the sonnet Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelly.
“The possibility that civilization could die doubles our own mortality.”
–Santo Mazzarino, The End of the Ancient World (1966)
In the first installment of this post, called “Re-thinking Democratic Legitimacy in a Time of Crisis,” I set out to challenge a set of assumptions that I have held for a couple of decades now about the rational foundations of democratic political legitimacy.
The present sense of political crisis has caused me to wonder if Americans’ commitment to democracy might actually be conditional, and whether democratic political legitimacy itself could simply collapse. To explore how this could be possible, I decided to confront a number of cherished assumptions about the increasing (or perhaps even just durable) rationality undergirding complex modern societies, including the latent assumption that increased modern societal rationalization (scientific, technical, organizational) represented the basis for some sort of irreversible democratic “arrow of history.”
To accomplish this, I realized I needed to inject some much-needed realism into my understanding of democratic political legitimacy. Relying on Juan Linz’s “The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes” I sought to understand the way in which actual people in complex societies believe in democratic political institutions, and if there is a specific set of crisis conditions for the political breakdown of mature democratic societies. I explored some of the ways, per Linz, that a majority commitment to a constitutional democracy can erode, be undermined, and finally, collapse in the transfer of legitimacy to semi-loyal forces that legally come to power, and then if and when conditions allow, declare their disloyalty to the system.
While Linz’s account of the dynamics of democratic breakdown is compelling (luridly so, given the present state of the GOP) his account of legitimacy remains problematic, in that it treats legitimacy as a social given, or as a fact of reason, without much concern for the process of “legitimation”, for the question of how we get to the belief that a claim to legitimacy is justified. Linz specifically describes only the what and the how of an unfolding crisis of democratic legitimacy.
If this is how we need to think about democratic socio-political legitimacy, then how can commitment to this legitimacy be seen to simply collapse? How does a leopard change its spots?
In my view, however, we still need to understand some things about democratic legitimation per se, if we are going to grasp the specific sort of legitimation crisis that has befallen us under present conditions of advanced capitalism. Getting at this still involves being able to look at legitimacy from within some sort of a moral point of view, if we want to see how a given claim to legitimacy gets taken as valid or justified. As I said at the end of my prior post, despite the addition of some much-needed realism in political theory, I also still need some idealist chocolate in my realist peanut butter.
Democratic Political Legitimation Crisis—A Realist Account of Breakdown
In my prior account of Juan Linz’s “The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes,” I showed how Linz introduced the notion of legitimacy. Linz was interested to understand “the how” of the breakdown of democratic regimes under political crisis conditions, something he thought had been largely missed by those who focused on “the why” of it (i.e., the structural contradictions of capitalism) and who assumed that such breakdown was simply inevitable. In order to understand how democratic regimes breakdown, Linz asserts, we must first grasp something about where obedience to these regimes comes from. So, on his way to this account of breakdown, he asks, “For what reasons do actual people in complex societies believe in the legitimacy of democratic institutions?”
What apparently does not matter, however, is whether there is ever a justified belief in this legitimacy. On this point, Weber is shockingly silent.
To be frank, Linz does not give very good answers to this question. In democracies, he says, there is something more than just the sorts of things that explain mere obedience to law and authority under other types of political arrangements. What is this something more? The something more, he says, is the belief (on the part of a substantial number of people) in the legitimacy of democratic rule. But this seems distressingly circular.
Reading between his lines, democratic legitimacy is special, Linz appears to want to say, because people give their allegiance freely, and understand that they do so, such that the legitimacy and the authority are derived from this very consent of the governed, this popular sovereignty. So once again, we come to the sense of entering into a social contract. If we ask further, “how we should understand this special validity?” Linz answers that there is a pragmatic sort of acceptance of the validity of democratic institutions, traditions, and positive law because of the minimal definition of legitimacy for modern persons such as ourselves: a legitimate government is one considered to be the least evil of the forms of government…the belief that no other type of regime could assure a more successful pursuit of collective goals.”
The crux of the problem here is that where Linz is talking about “the how” of democratic collapse in times of crisis, he exhibits a marked realism about legitimacy; but when he seeks to explain the nature of legitimacy in the first place, like the philosophers John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas, he has recourse to the redemption of a claim to validity—people believe in the legitimacy of the democratic political system because, in a very critical sense, they believe that the legitimacy claim being made for the political system is in fact true (is justified). But this brings me back to my original dilemma.
If this is how we need to think about democratic socio-political legitimacy, then how can commitment to this legitimacy be seen to simply collapse? How does a leopard change its spots? To address something like a contemporary “legitimation crisis” we need to decide: either there is, or there is not some sort of difference between democratic political legitimation and other forms of political legitimacy that have come to expression in human history.
Max Weber’s Sociological Concept of Legitimacy
This “conceptual crisis” concerning legitimation actually goes back to the early 20th century, with the birth of the interpretive sociology of Max Weber. In his posthumously published work, Economy and Society (1922) Weber describes how legitimacy functions in the context of social action. To begin with, he describes legitimacy in the context of domination, where domination is understood sociologically to be “the probability that the commands of a given authority will be obeyed.”
Wherever there is socially-oriented action toward some goal or set of goals, one finds structures of domination, Weber points out. Along with other sorts of appeals that result in recognition and acceptance of authority, one also always finds the effort to “establish and to cultivate belief in the legitimacy of the dominating authority.” Justification of legitimacy Weber writes, “is much more than a matter of theoretical or philosophical speculation.” As Weber does not fail to remind us, any temporal power needs to justify itself, because “the fates of human beings are not equal. He who is more favored feels the never-ceasing need to look upon his position as somehow legitimate, upon his advantage as deserved, and the other’s disadvantage as being brought about by the latter’s fault.”
The importance of belief in legitimacy becomes even more pointed where there is social and economic complexity, since the administration of complexity requires a necessary differentiation of functions, and thus an organization, to maintain the domination. Because domination is all about imposing a will upon the behavior of others, it is necessary that the ruler’s authority of command should affect the ruled as if the ruled had made the content of the command the maxim of their conduct for its own sake.
Weber is fully aware of what is at stake in the “as if” he has lodged in the prior statement. The mere external fact of the order being obeyed, he writes, is not sufficient to signify domination in the sense intended. We cannot overlook, he says, the meaning of the fact that the command is accepted as a valid norm.” What matters is that there be belief in the legitimacy of the authority to command if we are going to have an adequate description of how legitimacy functions (how legitimation occurs). Particular claims to legitimacy must be treated as valid, in order to confirm the position of the persons claiming authority.
What apparently does not matter, however, is whether there is ever a justified belief in this legitimacy. On this point, Weber is shockingly silent. Maintaining the standpoint of the interpretive social scientist, Weber identifies what he calls three “pure types” of functionally legitimate domination, corresponding to related claims to justification:
- Legitimate domination based on rational grounds. This involves belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of authority of those elevated to command under such rules. Here the authority of command is legitimate if it corresponds with the norms of the system of rules, which can be either agreed upon, Weber says, or imposed from above. Either way, obedience in this type is given to the norms rather than to the person.
- Legitimate domination based on traditional grounds. This involves having legitimacy turn upon belief in the sanctity of tradition. In this case, the authority of command rests upon personal authority that is founded upon the sacredness of tradition.
- Legitimate domination based on the ground of charisma. Here legitimacy turns upon the “special characteristics” of an individual person and of the normative order revealed or ordained by him. As in the prior case, the authority of command rests upon personal authority, through surrender to the person as savior, prophet, or hero.
In all of these cases, even the first one (rational grounds), “legitimate domination” is descriptive of how legitimation functions, up to and including the aspect of belief in legitimacy. Obedience to norms corresponding to rules of a legal system is not much different than obedience to personal authority, if the system of rules can be “either agreed upon or imposed from above.” But what of “legitimate legitimacy?” Are we really willing to dispense with the need and/or desire to redeem this sort of claim to validity, by giving reasons, by explaining and justifying our beliefs? Even while we recognize that our social and political life is very much a scene of domination, are we willing to live in a world where this claim to normative validity has no relation to truth?
Who precisely is performing such a calculus, for example in ancient Egypt? Does one simply take time out from mummifying eight million dogs and cats? What is the marginal return on this activity, by the way?
Reading these passages from Weber in Economy and Society, Jurgen Habermas has argued forcefully to the contrary that “legitimacy functions by assuming an immanent relation to truth.” Where we see the functionally necessary belief in legitimacy, Habermas is arguing, we also find, in principle, a validity claim to normative rightness that can be tested. As he writes in Legitimation Crisis, “For authority to be viewed as legitimate, the normative order must be positively established, and there must be belief in its legality; however, the state monopoly on legality does not simply suffice…the procedure itself is under pressure for legitimacy.”
With this in mind, Habermas asserts that there are really only two starkly opposed alternatives to grounding the legitimacy of legality, or with respect to establishing what I am loosely calling “the legitimacy of legitimacy claims:”
- Either, one follows down the road of Carl Schmitt, the legal philosopher of the third Reich, and assert that it is meaningless, as Habermas writes, to “probe behind the factual belief in legitimacy and the validity of norms for criticizable grounds of validity.” On this road, such validity claims are simply functionally necessary deceptions, and nothing more; the implication is that a norm of legitimacy is valid because it is legal, and for no other reason. If we ask what makes the law right, the answer we get back is only this: that someone with ultimate power of decision has decided that it is so, and that we recognize the authority of this “decider” because they say so, and no one has the power to challenge them (presumably because of their unique charisma).
- Or else, one follows down the road of assuming that moral-practical questions do admit of truth (as claims to moral rightness), and that justifiable norms can be distinguished from norms that merely stabilize relations of power. On this road, Habermas claims, we engage in the sort of rational reconstruction described in the first installment of this post. For example, by means of a rational reconstruction of everyday communication competence, one shows how we regularly and unavoidably establish and redeem claims to normative validity or moral rightness in our interactions with others aimed at arriving at various sorts of consensus.
Realism demands that a crisis of democratic legitimacy as such has to be thinkable. Idealism demands that belief in legitimacy can and must be justified.
All of this recalls my original dilemma once again, what I call my idealist-chocolate-in-my-realist-peanut-butter-problem. A completely idealist account of legitimacy and legitimation leads back to what I previously called my lib-tard slumber, in which the very idea that citizens of a democratic republic could simply decide to eschew democratic values is simply unthinkable. But a thoroughly realist account, along the lines of Weber, brings an unacceptable proximity to a fascist sort of decisionism, where one accepts that there are no shared values to call upon to ground the legitimacy of our laws.
On the Collapse of Complex Societies
Up to this point, which feels a bit like an impasse, I’ve written about the breakdown of democratic legitimacy under conditions of political crisis, and also about democratic legitimation per se (the process of asserting and validating legitimacy claims). To attempt to push through this, and make sense of what the present “legitimation crisis” is all about, I’m going to take a short detour through another book in order to think a bit more about societal complexity as such in relation to the crisis and collapse of political legitimacy.
For many years, I’ve had this rather unassuming little book by the anthropologist Joseph Tainter on my table. Published in 1988, the book is called “The Collapse of Complex Societies.” The book itself actually explains why it has fascinated me for so long. As Tainter writes in the introduction, “Lost civilizations, the rise and fall of civilizations…what happened to them?” Thinking about civilizations as fragile and impermanent captures our imaginations, he says, promoting disturbing questions like “Are modern societies similarly vulnerable?” As Tainter tells it, there is a shadow of fear that actually haunts the entire modern age—the irresistible allusion to the collapse of ancient Rome.
As with Juan Linz, Tainter is interested to fill a certain niche. The development of political complexity he says, has attracted more attention (historical, sociological, anthropological) than collapse, its antithesis. So, he goes on to try to explain collapse, understood precisely as the collapse of societal complexity. Collapse, he says, is a political process. A society has collapsed when it displays a “rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity.”
Tainter’s apparent anachronism, his assumption that the relationship between social integration and system integration is the same at all times and places, helps to point the way through my idealist-realist impasse about political legitimation.
Complex societies, Tainter goes on to say, are either states, or otherwise exhibit state-like characteristics. They are largish, they have distinctive numbers of parts, a variety of specialized roles, and there are a variety of mechanisms for organizing and integrating things. There is territorial integrity, and there is a monopoly on the use of force. There is also inequality (vertical social and economic differentiation) and heterogeneity (for example, distinct social personality types are in evidence).
Before getting to collapse, Tainter first tarries over the origin of the state. He takes inventory of the leading accounts. There is the managerial narrative; the narrative of internal conflict; the narrative of external conflict, etc. In the end, however, Tainter discerns two main types of account. There are what he calls the “integration school,” exemplified by the likes of Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, and Durkheim. There is also the “conflict school” whose patrilineal is Marx and Engels.
The integrationist school argues that complexity and stratification arose because of population stress and are actually positive responses to those stresses because complexity is in the service of population-wide needs. The conflict school asserts that the state emerged out of the needs and desires of individuals and subgroups, and so is based in divided interests, domination and exploitation, with institutions developed as coercive mechanisms to maintain the privileged position of a ruling class.
Tainter sees strong and weak points of both accounts (he says that integrationist theory ignores coercion, and conflict theory commits a form of psychological reductionism). But since Tainter is primarily interested in collapse, and not the origins of complexity per se, he does not linger here after sketching this out. Instead, he turns to the matter of legitimacy. Legitimacy, he writes, is a matter that touches on both views: all official ideologies appeal to the common good, and there is a sense in which legitimacy claims bind both the ruled and the rulers, because in the end, legitimized activities “must include real outputs, even if the returns are only a fraction of what has been secured by the rulers.”
He then goes on to consider a host of theories about the causes of collapse of complex societies, all in relation to loss of popular legitimacy: resource depletion; insufficient response to changing circumstances; encounters with other complex societies; class conflict or other contradictions; mismanagement; social dysfunction; chance concatenation of events; mystical explanations. Each has its undoubted local significance. But Tainter’s innovation is to go from this level to try to discern a higher level of generality.
Legitimation Crisis as Declining Marginal Rate of Return?
Per Tainter, it turns out that a cost/benefit analysis of the societal investment in a system characterized by complexity is ultimately what validates or de-validates political legitimacy. This is true, he claims, whether complexity arises as a response to social needs (integrationist model) or whether complexity arises as a response to class conflict and the need of an elite to maintain privilege (conflict model).
Complexity so understood, it turns out, is universally subject to the law of diminishing returns. At some point in the evolution of a society, Tainter writes, “continued investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy yields a declining marginal return.” In response to the decrease in the marginal rate of return on investment, a number of coping strategies come into play. Increased investment is tried; but while this yields an increased return, the marginal rate continues to drop. Energy subsidies are acquired via territorial expansions, yielding only a temporary rise in marginal productivity. Unrest grows, and with it the cost of maintaining legitimacy goes up, and reserve resources start to be used up just to cover operating expenses, adding a double whammy to the deceleration effect.
At some point in this process, system stakeholders begin to weigh the marginal cost of evolution to a higher level of complexity versus the alternatives of staying at the present level, or devolution to a lower level. Over time, a crossing occurs, and the option to decompose, to sever ties, to opt out as it were, becomes explicitly attractive. In the end, however it happens, whether through breakup or military overthrow, collapse leads to a return, at least at a local level, to a marginal return on organizational investment that can be sustained once again.
Tainter makes his case in the manner of a historian/cultural anthropologist, with lots of cross-cultural examples. The book is full of compelling evidence concerning Olmecs and Chacoans, Hittites, Egyptians and Mesopotamians, and lots of others. Also, there is the overarching template, the details of the decline of the Roman empire. The book is compelling in a number of respects. But one has to stop and wonder whether this sort of argument, belonging to our own time, where economic liberalism has become so thoroughly reified, should really be taken as such a clear trans-historical constant. Can it really make sense to assume that socio-political legitimacy, in all times and in all places, is pegged to effective economic steering and other such system imperatives? Who precisely is performing such a calculus, for example in ancient Egypt? Does one simply take time out from mummifying eight million dogs and cats? What is the marginal return on this activity, by the way?
Legitimation Crisis Under Conditions of Advanced Capitalism
The most striking thing to me about Tainter’s account of the collapse of complex societies as described above is the fact that he doesn’t make much of a distinction between complex societies in general, and complex modern societies in particular. As a result, like Weber, he doesn’t identify anything distinctive about belief in democratic political legitimation per se. And yet, Tainter’s account of legitimation crisis appears to be modernist through and through—functionally legitimate authority breaks down, Tainter asserts, whether it be in ancient Egypt, or Mesoamerica, or the Roman Empire, when ruling elites find themselves unable to effectively manage the economy and other aspects of the administration of a complex society, when the return on investment in managed complexity ceases to pay a societal dividend, and some plurality of stakeholders decide that they have had enough.
Tainter’s apparent anachronism, his assumption that the relationship between social integration and system integration is the same at all times and places, helps to point the way through my idealist-realist impasse about political legitimation.
In the book Legitimation Crisis, where he is introducing the social scientific concept of crisis, Jurgen Habermas says that it is actually meaningful to distinguish four different types of social formation, each with its own determining principle of organization, openness to possibilities for social evolution, and also with respect to “the type of crisis that it allows.” These are as follows:
- There is the primitive social formation. Its organizational principle is age and sex, and its institutional core is the kinship system. Exposure to other societies, e.g., cosmopolitanism, overloads the steering capacity of such societies by undermining familial and tribal identities.
- Next, there is the traditional society, where authority and control, ownership of production and distribution are differentiated out of the kinship system and transferred to a bureaucratic apparatus. Its principle is class domination. The type of crisis here involves lack of legitimacy and class struggle due to contradictions inherent in the class structure.
- Then there is the liberal-capitalist form of social formation. Here the principle of organization is the relationship of wage labor and capital, anchored in civil law. In this formation, class domination is anonymized, and legitimate power serves above all to maintain general conditions of production and market regulation. Because the economic system has become largely self-regulating, it is no longer dependent upon socio-cultural integration, and so the political order becomes relieved of the pressures of legitimation. Here crisis still manifests, but in the form of periodic failures of economic steering that appear almost like natural disasters for the bourgeois class, and serve to fuel revolutionary hopes among wage laborers.
For the moment, I am going to forego a capsule summary of the fourth type, the advanced capitalist formation, with its own specific type of legitimation crisis. This will be the subject of the final installment of this post.
In lieu of a proper ending, I will simply say that Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies, as written from within the assumptions of what Habermas here calls the liberal-capitalist social formation, seems to want to apply a historically-conditioned experience of legitimation crisis (where the rules of market-oriented governmentality appear to have the force of natural laws) to all cases where complex societies are seen to have collapsed. But if Habermas is right, then legitimation crises have specific characteristics based on the sort of social, economic, and administrative structures of the societies in which they occur.
In the final installment of this multi-part post (which is still determined to be about the present democratic political legitimation crisis) I will rely on Habermas’s ostensibly “historical-materialist approach” to move beyond my “idealist-realist” impasse about legitimation crisis.
Realism demands that a crisis of democratic legitimacy as such has to be thinkable. Idealism demands that belief in legitimacy can and must be justified (that there are better and worse justifications, and that its important that we insist upon the better ones). I think it’s possible for me to have both my chocolate and my peanut butter by starting with the assumption that there is a specific sort of crisis of advanced capitalist political legitimacy, and that it has something to do with our being at the tail end of the transition from the liberal-capitalist to the advanced capitalist configuration of the relationship between processes of social integration and system integration.
