ABSTRACT
Traditionally, social arrangements attain legitimacy when they appear to reflect a natural order. Weber’s typology distinguishes the static nature of legitimacy based on tradition and custom (the Indian caste type) to that of legitimacy based on rational discussion, agreement and formalised procedure (legal-rational). Sociology has aided in legitimising modern social arrangements through reinforcing the conception of modern society as freeing itself from the remnants of the pre-modern feudal system and becoming the reflection of a structuralfunctional complex. Social theory which stresses meritocracy, jurisprudence which holds out law as rational, coherent and well principled, aids legitimacy by sustaining the imagery of a functioning system working for modern aims. This is rendered problematic by post-modernism. Late-modern legitimacy works in a different fashion:
Self-control and disciplinisation
A crucial aspect of social control is socialisation. Socialisation is the incorporation of mechanisms of predictability and repetitive behaviour in the actor without obvious recourse to the coercion of the state; modern actions are deemed rational actions, that is a specific form of social action in which actors can explain their actions by reason defined by the pursuit of an understandable goal or as fitting the norms (rules) of behaviour. Instead of social control as represented by socialisation into the fixed pattern of beliefs of a mechanical solidarity, the social control of organic solidarity was a dialectic, or interaction, of self and socialising context, with self and social control being two aspects of the same process. This process has intensified, and while it denotes the social creation of the autonomous self for late-modernity, it occurs in the problematic conditions of post-modernism.
