Legitimation

Forms of Legitimation

One can find a wide variety of forms of legitimation throughout history and across societies and cultures. The roots of the modern discussion of legitimation in Western societies rest in the writings of Max Weber (1864–1920). Weber argued that the ability to issue commands that people would obey did not rest solely on the possession or ability to use power. He suggested that there were also rules that people would voluntarily obey and authorities whose directives they would voluntarily follow. He defined legitimacy as a quality possessed by an authority or institution that led people to feel obligated to obey its decisions or rules.

Like his contemporaries Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), as well as more recent writers, Weber focused on the manner in which social norms become part of people's internal motive systems, guiding people's behavior even in the absence of external authority. His work concerned the replacement of control by others with self-control. This internalization process is intertwined with the development of justifying ideologies through which people come to believe that authorities deserve to be obeyed.

Weber's work further illustrated the point that legitimation can take many forms. He distinguished among three forms of legitimacy that could lead people voluntarily to defer to authorities: traditional authority, charismatic authority, and rational authority. Traditional authority is linked to the authority associated with deference to traditional values and customs. Charismatic authority flows from an individual's purity, heroism, and character. Finally,rational authority rests on a belief in the legality of enacted rules and their interpretation by appropriate authorities. Of these forms, rational authority reflected the nature of legitimacy in modern Western government and law.

...