Whoever thinks that political analysis has to involve specialised studies will perhaps have been surprised in reading the present work. But as it has seemed to us, it is in adopting a relatively global approach, putting things in historical perspective and taking the operation of society into account, that it was possible to tackle legitimacy without remaining a prisoner of the limitations imposed by prior reflections upon this question.

The social sciences, and in particular political science, have supplanted philosophy in the study of politics. This process is connected to the specialised way in which social and political phenomena have been analysed and to the abandonment of the goal of taking a position on explicitly assumed values. Rather than one asking oneself under what conditions it is possible to preserve the possibility of doing a study of human reality that integrates the level of the Ought without for all that exhibiting dogmatic tendencies, it has generally been preferred to adopt a fragmented approach whose wish is to remain principally descriptive.

The problem of justice, however, and therefore that of political justice, does not cease to be posed to individuals. It is one of the essential issues of life in society. The proof is that those observers who adopt as their own the separation of facts from values soon contradict this idea of separation. In reality, they very quickly break away from the thesis to which they are supposedly adhering – without, unfortunately, ever adapting the theory to their practice.