ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 outlines a discursive understanding of what legitimacy is and where it comes from. It argues for treating legitimacy as a product of public debate, and introduces two distinct ‘Foucauldian’ and ‘Habermasian’ normative approaches to understanding how this works and what it means in practice. For Foucauldians, government communications can generate consensus, but not legitimacy in any normative sense. Whatever support ministers achieve reflects their power over domestic audiences, nothing more. For Habermasians, by contrast, a properly conducted public deliberation can produce the sort of agreement among democratic actors that legitimacy derives from. To secure this normative status, leaders must be honest, open to public debate and flexible in the face of opposition. Understanding the legitimacy deficit surrounding Iraq therefore means looking both at the substance of the arguments the Blair government made, and the form in which it made them.
