Introduction

The way in which the vast literature on the nature of politics and the state in Africa has treated ‘legitimacy’ strongly resembles what, in the Introduction, I stated with regard to the social science and historical literature more generally. Scholars of politics in Africa use the notion of legitimacy expansively, yet they have paid surprisingly little attention to the exact criteria and process of assessing a political system's or individual power holders’ legitimacy. Also missing are conceptual reflections on the actors who assess and attribute authority, on their diversity, and on the dynamics that structure relations among them and that, in all likelihood, influence the very process of legitimation. This lack of attention is all the more surprising as most authors seem to agree that legitimacy ultimately refers to a social relationship or, as I would conceive of it, a web of social relations that include the person in power, and various, diversely connected actors who assess his exercise of power or/and the validity of a political system. A systematic account is needed of the grounds on which political legitimacy is based in concrete historical and cultural situations, and also of the actors who are involved in actual assessments of the legitimacy of a political order or individual powerholders.

As I spelled out in the Introduction, David Beetham's tripartite model of legitimacy offers a good starting point for a systematic empirical exploration of the ‘social construction of legitimacy’ (Beetham 1991: chs 2, 3). However, when using Beetham's model for a historically informed, empirical account a word of caution is in place. Beetham criticizes Weber and all authors who adopted his approach to legitimacy for equating legitimacy with people's subjective beliefs about whether or not a system or a person is legitimate. Still, when discussing the justifiability of rules as the second dimension of legitimacy, Beetham himself risks conceiving the problem as a matter of beliefs (that is, of subjective judgements about legitimacy).