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Legitimacy Crisis: Again?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2005

Bruce Gilley
Bruce Gilley
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

Since the dawn of time, it seems, social critics have been warning of a “crisis of legitimacy” in the political world. Manuel Castells repeats this ageless battle-cry in his 2004 Ithiel de Sola Pool lecture (PS, January 2005, 9–16), warning darkly of an “increasing alienation of citizens” that “threatens to undo the democratic system” (9). As proof, he offers an array of point-in-time survey results from Western countries in recent years, as well as anecdotal evidence of “the expression of political protest” in places like California and France (9). Yet, none of this shows anything except the fact that states are imperfect creations for the expression of political community and, as Isaiah Berlin might have added, the timeless costs of social life.

Type
FORUM
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , July 2005 , pp. 357
Copyright
© 2005 The American Political Science Association

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References

Habermas, Jurgen. 1975. Legitimation Crisis. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and Utopia. New York: Harcourt, Brace.Google Scholar
Pye, Lucian. 1971. The Legitimacy Crisis: Crises and Sequence in Political Development, eds. L. Binder et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar