10 - Legitimation crisis?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
I want to explore the question of whether we can speak of a ‘legitimation crisis’ in Western capitalist societies, and how it is to be conceived. I think we have not yet developed the concepts we need to come to terms with this fruitfully, and I want to try slowly and painfully to edge towards them here.
The belief that capitalism destroys itself is, of course, central to the Marxist tradition. Capital adumbrates a number of ways in which the system careens towards breakdown owing to the uncontrolled nature of capitalist accumulation. Later this vision has been refined, modified, even abandoned by some. We have had revised theories: that the system tends to increasing arms production, or imperialism, or both; that it tends to export its contradictions to the international sphere. More recently, we have theories like that of James O'Connor which see capitalist economies as generating external costs that they cannot assume, which must be assumed by the political system, thus threatening its legitimacy.
I think this latter type of theory is approaching a theoretically fruitful area, in which we can identify something like ‘contradictions’ in modern advanced capitalist society. But I think we can only make headway if we focus our attention on the question of legitimation. The breakdown, or self-undermining, of capitalism cannot be adequately understood, I want to claim, if we think of it primarily in economic terms: as a failure of output, or an escalation of costs. Rather, societies destroy themselves when they violate the conditions of legitimacy which they themselves tend to posit and inculcate.
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- Philosophical Papers , pp. 248 - 288Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1985
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