ABSTRACT
A term in sociologist Max Weber’s sociology of politics which means the acknowledgement on the part of a society’s subjects of the right of their rulers to rule them. In the post-war period the issue of legitimation has become a central issue in social, political and cultural discussions. For Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, for example, the question of legitimation is one that is continually suspended within a theoretical double bind. Questions of legitimation, on this view, are really genre questions concerning appropriate means to particular ends (see discourse), and cannot be divorced from consideration of their social and cultural dimensions. Lyotard argues that there are no universal criteria for legitimation and that, in consequence, the political level is a realm of cultural antagonism between contending purposes rather than goal oriented. He does, however, reserve a critical space for the study of language: the open-ended philosophical analysis of rules. Politics, on a Lyotardean model, would be about competing claims being fought out within the space of cultural life, not in terms of some overall, most desirable state of affairs towards which society should be aiming. Ju¨rgen Habermas, in contrast, has tried to argue against this view (which endorses a politics of conflict or ‘dissensus’) with a consensual reading of the social language of ‘communicative action’.
