Legitimacy is probably the single most important concept in political analysis

America’s Crisis of Political Legitimacy

by James V. DeLong

The Founders were right to posit that a breakdown of the limits of government would cause a breakdown of consent. Only 22 percent of likely voters say the current government has the consent of the governed.

Across many decades, my mind’s eye sees Professor Samuel Beer pacing the lecture hall stage at Harvard, talking about the accession of Henry II to the throne of England in 1154 and the end of 20 years of anarchy.

Beer’s interest is not antiquarian, because he is focused on timeless principles and especially on their contemporary relevance. He uses Henry II to introduce the class to the concept of political legitimacy, which he defined in his writing as “the claim of a government to the obedience and loyalty of their citizens/subjects,” and the underlying principles that determine how the right to make this claim is gained or lost.

Throughout the year, the class time travels to societies in crisis over legitimacy: From the England of Henry II to its long revolution of 1640 to 1688 to the American Revolution in 1776, the French and Russian Revolutions of 1789 and 1917, and Weimar Germany as Hitler comes to power in 1933.

In each instance, a government has forfeited its claim to obedience and loyalty—at least in the view of a significant portion of its subjects—and has broken down. The questions are: Why? And what comes next? At the extreme, a polity’s condition reaches the state described by a Russian revolutionary leader when he said that the Bolsheviks did not seize power; they found it lying in the gutter and picked it up.

Legitimacy is probably the single most important concept in political analysis, and Beer’s class could have continued indefinitely. The fall of the Soviet Union would be a fine topic, and China’s 20th-century evolutions could occupy a whole year, especially its latest effort to shift from Maoism as a basis of legitimacy to successful economic development. This is the political equivalent of a triple flip without a net.

The time-traveling class should also drop in on the United States in 2012, which is slipping into a crisis of legitimacy relatively unnoticed.

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