INTRODUCTION

Political legitimacy is centrally concerned with the justification of political authority: what reasons do people have to obey the commands (comply with the law, follow the rules) of a political order? So understood, legitimacy is an intrinsically normative construct: not any reason counts toward legitimacy, but only reasons that are valid from a moral point of view. As Max Weber acknowledged, people have many different reasons to comply with the dictates of political power holders, but only some of these reasons – the normative ones – count toward the legitimacy of a regime. Hope of benefits and fear of sanctions constitute prudential reasons for obedience, but they do not reflect the people's judgment whether the political order is justified in its exercise of power. Thus while many interpreters of the distinction between empirical and normative accounts of political legitimacy characterize the former as “descriptive” and the latter as “prescriptive,” this is misleading. It makes perfect sense for empirical social scientists to seek to understand the degree to which a particular political order enjoys legitimacy in the eyes of its people, but to be meaningful this endeavor must take account of whether the people believe its power of command to be justifiable according to some normative principle that they endorse.

In Western intellectual traditions, theoretical accounts of political legitimacy are deeply connected to the circumstances of modernity. The connection between modernity and theories of political legitimacy is equally strong for the social scientific tradition inaugurated by Max Weber and for the normative tradition of political philosophy stretching from Locke and Rousseau to Rawls and Habermas.