Where does legitimacy come from?

According to that great oracle Wikipedia (and I make no apologies for citing it) “In political science, legitimacy is the popular acceptance of a governing law or régime as an authority.”

So far so good. ‘Popular acceptance’ seems in our society to be largely defined as the absence of its opposite which ties in neatly enough with Locke’s concept of implicit consent to governance.

That, to a large extent, is what legitimacy is: knowing where it comes from is an altogether tougher proposition. The American political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset said that legitimacy also “involves the capacity of a political system to engender and maintain the belief that existing political institutions are the most appropriate and proper ones for the society.”

We can pretty much take that proposition as axiomatic and we can also put it in another way: we will only allow ourselves to be governed if the governing class can convince us that they are the men or women for the job. They don’t have to actually be able to govern, they just have to give a good enough impression of it to prevent too close an enquiry into the actual state of affairs.

That analysis is, in fairness, a rather bleak and cynical assessment of the human condition. What about Martin Luther King or Gandhi or any number of less notable but no less noble individuals who gave their lives for causes higher than mere concern with their mortality? Surely there’s something higher, a set of ideals that are fixed in some lofty ethical pantheon? Maybe not.

There is however a school of thought based around higher law and that suggests that the rule according to a higher law means that no written law may be enforced by the government unless it conforms with certain unwritten, universal principles of fairness, morality, and justice but you start going down that road, before you know it, people are calling you a liberation theologian. Certainly we are right back at Aristotelian first principles here in that “poverty is the parent of revolution and crime”.

So what can void this contract of legitimacy between a citizen and his government? At what point does it become permissible or perhaps even imperative that a citizen defies the laws of his land? Or put another way, how badly must the government fail its people before the reservoir of implicit consent to governance is finally exhausted? That still seems to be a matter of individual conscience.

Well, if one does go down the road of withdrawing their individual consent to be governed, the logical thing to do at that point is seek out like-minded individuals in the marketplace of ideas.

Now, I don’t profess to know too much about this sort of thing but apparently there are three major requirements for the mounting of a successful revolution. These are (and stop me if you heard them before) material conditions among the populace being adverse enough to stimulate mass support for action; an ideological framework to give direction to the movement; and an organisational structure to coordinate the movement.

On that analysis, we are a long way from revolution. Material conditions are bad in that we are in the midst of an economic depression but speaking as someone who survived the last one; ‘this generation don’t know they’ve been born’. Things would need to get a lot worse before I could see this self-serving  generation of Thatcher’s grandchildren getting off their sedentary arses to fight for anything that didn’t qualify as self-gratification.

In terms of providing an ideological framework to respond to the changing situation, the left has been conspicuously slack. Maybe Thatcherism really has changed the parameters of political debate in Britain so as to whittle all arguments down to the self-interest principle.

One thing is certain, no-one seems prepared to countenance the unpalatable truth of how our ruling class conducts itself. We are content with bread and circuses just as were the Romans.

As for an organisational framework for a revolutionary organisation? Don’t make me laugh, this is a society where a flash mob is viewed as a newsworthy logistical triumph.

So all in all, not great news in the western world for revolution watchers. We still give our shoddy little governments an unthinking legitimacy and even if we didn’t we are not even within an asses roar of creating the conditions of revolution. But then again if you like betting on long-shots (I know I do), in our increasingly networked society, all of these conditions could be realised in a surprisingly short time frame in the event of geopolitical upheaval or the global economy continues to tank. Any takers?