ABSTRACT
Max Weber, using a descriptive approach to legitimacy, stated that a regime had legitimacy if its participants were willing to obey it due to a belief “by virtue of which persons exercising authority are lent prestige”. In contrast to Weber’s descriptive approach, John Rawls and others have posited a normative approach to capturing the source of legitimacy. The “empirical theories” focus on the belief systems of those governed by the political institutions as opposed to the descriptive rules of Weber or the general criteria for legitimacy used in the normative approach. JUrgen Habermas, in his seminal work “Legitimation Crisis”, was critical of the purely descriptive approach of Weber, identifying that political institutions can lose legitimacy despite retaining legal authority. Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed that, even on a domestic level, “complete legitimacy is impossible because of the difficulty of uncovering the general interest in a constantly evolving social situation” but that the legitimacy that is achievable is found through consensus.
