Legitimacy in a Pluralist Context

Abstract

The idea of legitimacy is, notoriously, a bi-modal one. On the one hand, we have the empirical notion of 'legitimacy'. Some social arrangement is legitimate if it enjoys the support of its 'stakeholders'. It is apparent already that this notion admits of degrees - there are greater and lesser degrees of support by greater and lesser fractions of the stakeholder population, for instance. ...On the other hand, we have the normative notion of 'LEGITIMACY' (marked hereafter by the use of capital letters). Some social arrangement is 'LEGITIMATE' if it has been justified in some appropriate way. It is apparent that this notion too is a complex one. it might well admit of degrees - there are stronger and weaker arguments justifying different social arrangements. And there are, of course, many different values and principles, with wider and narrower cogency among stakeholders, in terms of which 'LEGITIMATION' might be undertaken, with, therefore, sometimes equivocal results.