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... timely (though Locke himself never uses these terms to describe the distinction). But Locke, in my view, is in certain ways clearer about the distinction than is Notice. For Locke, remember, "no one can be put out of [the state of nature] and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent. " (16) Political power is morally legitimate, and those subject to it are morally obligated to obey, only where the subjects have freely consented to the exercise of such power and only where that power continues to be exercised within the terms of the consent given.
The legitimacy of particular states thus turns on consent, on the actual history of that state's relations with its subjects. But Locke also offers us (especially in chap. 9 of the Second Treatise of Government) a different and quite general argument for the moral and prudential prefer ability of states ruled by limited governments to life in the state of nature. This other argument is plainly addressed to those who maintain that the state in any form is morally or prudentially inferior to life without the state. Notice that in justifying the (limited) state -- by rebutting the anarchist objection -- Locke says nothing about the actual consent that is required to legitimate a particular state with respect to its subjects. (17) That the limited state is justified -- that having limited states (governments) is on balance a good thing and that we have good reason to create them -- does not appear for Locke to show that any particular limited state is legitimate, that any state (government) has the right to rule over any or all persons within its (claimed) domain (i.
e. , the right to occupy the position of authority). (18) This Lockean account utilizes one standard moral conception of state legitimacy, (19) and it is this conception of "legitimacy" that I will hereafter have in mind when I use that term. A state's (or government's) legitimacy is the complex moral right it possesses to be the exclusive imposer of binding duties on its subjects, to have its subjects comply with these duties, and to use coercion to enforce the duties. Accordingly, state legitimacy is the logical correlate of various obligations, including subjects' political obligations. (20) A state's "legitimacy right" is in part a right held specifically against the subjects bound by any state-imposed duties, arising from morally significant relations -- in Locke's case, consensual relations -- between state and subject. It follows that "on balance" state legitimacy may be complete or partial, depending on whether such relations hold with all or only with some of those against whom the state enforces the duties it imposes (though the state is, of course, either fully legitimate or fully illegitimate with respect to each individual under its rule). I do not here take up at any length questions about how state legitimacy is related to governmental legitimacy; I focus principally on questions about state legitimacy. Governments can presumably be illegitimate even where the states they govern are not.
But state and governmental legitimacy seem not to be independent of one another, since an illegitimate state could not, I think, have a legitimate government. On the Lockean model this is easily explained. According to this model, states ("civil societies" or "commonwealths, " in Locke's parlance) earn their legitimacy by virtue of the (unanimous) consent of their members, a consent that transfers to the collectivity those rights whose exercise by a central authority is necessary for a viable political society. Governments are legitimate only if they have been entrusted by the state (society) with the exercise of those same rights. (21) So while a legitimate state might have an illegitimate government (one that, say, acquired its power by force rather than by trust), an illegitimate state could never have a legitimate government since illegitimate states do not possess the rights, transferred to them by their subjects' consents, that must be entrusted by a state to a government in order to legitimate that government. There are, of course, many other conceptions of state legitimacy, quite different from the strong Lockean conception just described. Some theorists have advocated weaker moral notions of legitimacy, according to which legitimacy is a mere liberty right or "justification right" (22) -- a fight which correlates with no other parties' obligations (e.
g. , with obligations to obey the law or to refrain from rival attempts to impose duties). Such notions of legitimacy, as we shall see, sharply diminish the argumentative distance between accounts of state justification and accounts of state legitimacy. There is also a host of conceptions of state legitimacy -- those used in ordinary political discourse and those advocated by various social scientists and political theorists -- whose connections to either of the aforementioned moral conceptions of legitimacy are not immediately clear. For instance, we sometimes count states as legitimate if they achieve certain kinds of international recognition -- if they are "accepted into the community of nations" -- or if they remain stable over long periods of time, exercising effective or unchallenged control over a fixed territory. Or we might call a regime legitimate that was simply "lawful, " in the sense that it came to power and continues to govern according to the generally accepted rules of its state, or if it refrained from the persecution or deliberate impoverishment of its subjects (or of particular groups of subjects). (23) Or we might, with the majority of contemporary social scientists (and following Weber), call "legitimate" those regimes that are accepted or approved of by their subjects in certain distinctive ways.
The satisfaction of any of these criteria might, of course, be said to confer on a regime the kind of moral legitimacy we have been discussing. But while concerns about a state's stability or lawfulness or about institutional racism and persecution are clearly moral concerns, they are concerns bearing more obviously on what I have been calling the state's justification than on its legitimacy. That a state is stable and lawful and refrains from persecution shows that it is good (or, at least, not bad) in certain ways, but it does not obviously show that the state has the kind of special moral relationship with any particular subjects that gives it a right to rule them. And international recognition, considered alone, plainly tracks the moral legitimacy of states at best irregularly. What, though, of the last, Weberian conception of legitimacy?
Its popularity and its apparent similarity to the Lockean, consent-based conception of legitimacy warrants a slightly more extended consideration of this proposal. One proponent of the Weberian view, Charles Taylor, distinguishes between two senses of "legitimacy" as follows. On his preferred use, legitimacy "is meant to designate the beliefs and attitudes that members have toward the society they make up. The society has legitimacy when members so understand and value it that they are willing to assume the disciplines and burdens which membership entails.
Legitimacy declines when this willingness flags or fails. " (24) Worries about the possibility of a contemporary "legitimation crisis" are often understood in this way -- that is, in terms of the special difficulties faced by today's industrial democracies in maintaining or generating the attitudes of allegiance, loyalty, or identification on which their "legitimacy" (in this first sense of the word) depends. (25) Taylor contrasts legitimacy in this first, "attitudinal" sense with what he calls "the seventeenth century use of the term not to describe people's attitudes, but as a term of objective evaluation of regimes. " (26) The majority of the social scientists writing about legitimacy during the second half of this century have, like Taylor, identified legitimacy with members' positive beliefs, attitudes, perceptions, or other "favorable orientations" toward their society or its regime. In this, as I have noted, they mostly take themselves to be following Weber, who famously attempted to analyze the legitimacy of power solely in terms of people's belief in its legitimacy. (27) The most familiar criticism of this analysis of legitimacy points to its quite obvious circularity. But this is not a particularly difficult problem to repair, for Weber can be easily corrected to say more carefully (as he himself sometimes does) that the extent of a regime's legitimacy is equivalent to the extent to which its subjects regard its directives as obligatory or authoritative, or regard the regime as lawful, exemplary, morally acceptable, or appropriate for the society. Legitimacy is then just understood as the "reservoir of loyalty on which leaders can draw, " (28) the subjects' beliefs in the regime's authority (or their feelings of allegiance, trust, or other attachment) that will typically produce compliance and support (or at least guilt feelings on occasions of noncompliance and nonsupport). (29) There are, however, more serious problems facing attitudinal accounts of legitimacy.
One is that such accounts make judgments of legitimacy turn out to be about the wrong thing. Just as subjectivism accounts of moral judgment implausibly understand my judgment that an act is wrong, say, as a statement that I have negative feelings about that act -- so that the "moral judgment" oddly turns out to be about me instead of about the act -- so attitudinal accounts of political legitimacy make judgments of legitimacy too much about subjects and too little about their states. To call a state legitimate is surely to say something about it, about the rights it possesses or the scope of its authority. The attitudes of a state's subjects can at best be part of what argues for its legitimacy, not that in which its legitimacy consists. It will not do, however, in response to this problem, to simply shift our focus onto the properties of the state that produce feelings of allegiance or support, so that legitimacy can be redefined as "the capacity of the system to engender and maintain the belief that the existing political institutions are the most appropriate ones for the society. " (30) For there is a second and much deeper problem with all accounts of legitimacy that thus centrally refer to subjects' beliefs or attitudes: no plausible theory of state legitimacy could maintain that a state has the rights in which its legitimacy consists -- rights to exclusively impose and coercively enforce binding duties on its subjects -- simply in virtue of its subjects' feelings of loyalty or its own capacities to generate such feelings. Surely by now the history of human oppression has taught us how often people come to feel obligated toward and believe in the rights of those who simply wield over them irresistible power, with no more moral authority over them than such power yields.
Attitudinal accounts of state legitimacy appear to disregard such lessons. On such accounts states could create or enhance their own legitimacy by indoctrination or mind control; or states might be legitimated solely by virtue of the extraordinary stupidity, immorality, imprudence, or misperceptions of their subjects. Bibliography:
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