On Legitimation
Reading Taylor’s Part 1 ‘The Work of Reform’, and following his account of how modern, secular society—how the modern, secular state—emerged out of earlier, religiously framed social structures, I started to wonder if something was missing. I say so tentatively, since this is an area in which I am not an expert. But neither am I complete noob, so …you know.
So: Taylor talks in terms of ‘the rise of the disciplinary
society’ (it’s the title of his chapter 2). He diagnoses a change in the way
‘people’ thought of the world around them: a ‘series of shifts’ that
‘cumulatively take the master description of the world as ens creatum in a
radically different direction’, towards a situation in which ‘all intrinsic
purpose having been expelled, final causation drops out and efficient causation
alone remains.’ (p.97-98). This, says Taylor, entails a ‘mechanisation of the
world picture’; ‘we trade in a universe of ordered signs, in which everything
has a meaning, for a silent but beneficent machine’ (p.98). From this Taylor
goes on to the rise of ‘civility’, the urbanising and socially normative logic
of this machine-world, that in turn promotes ‘ordered government’ through
‘discipline, training’ (p.101)—hence the disciplinary society. Everyone must be
obedient and industrious (he quotes a 17th-century Puritan that
beggars ‘are as rotten legs and arms that drop from the body’: so no more mendicant monks or charity for the indigent), and there is a
crack-down on Bakhtinian carnival too: ‘coming down hard on charivaris, carnival,
feasts of “misrule” dancing in church.’ Taylor notes: ‘here also we see a
reversal. What had previously been seen as normal, which everybody had been
prepared to participate in, now seems utterly condemnable and … disturbing’
(p.109). This last claim seems to me to go quite a long way too far, but I
don’t want to get distracted.
In all this Taylor diagnoses what he calls ‘a modernized
Stoicism’ (p.117) which leads to ‘humanism’—a ferociously complex word, of
course, but which Taylor is using as a thumbnail for a kind of rational
secularism, I think. These become the underlying ethos, or at least as
something approximating to that. Behind it is all ‘Deism’, a belief system I
would have described as pretty marginal, a predilection of a small caste of intellectuals,
scientists and social scientists.[1]
But though I’d always assumed Deism was a minor strand in the twined-together cable
of 17th- and 18th-century religion, Taylor assigns it a
central place. It is, for him, the pivot upon which the old religious social
order swung about to our modern secular one.
What’s missing from this account? I'd suggest: the concept of legitimacy.
Which is to say, Taylor is either missing it, or else is using his
Deism-neoStoicism-Humanism narrative to redescribe it in quasi-theological,
quasi-ethical terms. Or else I’ve missed something major in his account, which
is also perfectly possible.
But the little I do know about work on the rise of
the modern state is that contemporary scholarship sees this rise as all tangled up in debates around how
these states established their legitimacy. Under the old system, state power legitimated
itself with appeals to God: Pope, Emperor, King were all divinely anointed, God’s
representatives on Earth. So much is in line with Taylor’s larger argument, of
course. And he’s obviously right that something happened to change that: in the
English Revolution and Civil War this idea of the divine right of kings was
rather effectively challenged, although there was considerable, shall we say,
friction in the challenging, resistance from a large tranche of the population
who still bought-in to the old divine-right idea. But the point is that this was argued over, in
tracts and in Parliament and in the street, in terms of legitimation—not in
terms of Deism, Stoicism or humanism. Divine right is a top-down model of the
legitimacy of power; the new states depended upon ‘mutual acceptance of the
obligations’ by rulers and ruled, such that we move to a position in which
‘legitimate government is a relationship between state and subjects’ [R Barker,
Political Legitimacy and the State (OUP 1990), 2]. Here’s Michael J
Braddick:
Legitimacy is a key term in the
sociological definition of political power and therefore of the state. A
discussion of how legitimacy is claimed, established and sustained is crucial
to the issues being addressed here [ie the development of the modern state]
… Legitimacy is a crucial concept but it is also a slippery one. It cannot be
reduced simply to legal validity, not least because it is plainly the case that
political actions can be legal without being regarded as legitimate, or vice
versa … Actions can confer legitimacy on a regime, implying acceptance of its
claims and helping make them good in practice. [Michael J Braddick, State
Formation in Early Modern English, 1550-1700 (CUP 2000), 68-69]
Braddick notes that compliance is tricky to interpret ‘since
it might derive from approval, or the lack of a viable alternative’ such, ‘at
this minimal level legitimacy might simply mean acquiescence.’ But then again,
compliance might index positive, even enthusiastic, feelings about the
political power under which one lives.
We’ve seen this during the last few years Brexit catastrophe,
much of the enormity of which manifestly stems from the fact of calling a
referendum in the first place—not because the Brexiteers won the referendum by
a tiny margin (although they did) by cheating (although, again, they did), but
because enacting the result of the referendum entailed a destructive, ongoing
clash of narratives of legitimation. For Brexiteers the referendum was ‘the
voice of the people’; and therefore disapproving that result or criticizing the subsequent
handling of the Brexit process was seen as challenging the grounds on which
democracy itself is legitimated—hence the furious accusations that those not
embracing the result were traitors, enemies of the people, deserving of contumely and vitriol and so on. But
alongside this referendum the actual process of democratic governance, based on
an entirely different principle of legitimation—elected representatives—carried
on. This differend, this Antigone-style clash of two different narratives of
legitimation, was and continues to be disastrous for UK politics.
I don’t mean to get sidelined into merely parochial
concerns. Braddick's State Formation book quotes David Beetham’s The Legitimation of Power (London
1991) that ‘a given power relationship is not legitimate because people believe
in its legitimacy, but because it can be justified in terms of their beliefs.’
Beetham is interested not in individual motivations for things like compliance,
but rather in ‘the broader social conventions’ within which various actions
‘confer legitimacy’. That sounds like Taylor’s social imaginaries: but actually
the point being made here is rather different to the one Taylor advances.
The shift is from legitimation depending on the Vox Dei to legitimation derived from the Vox Populi, with that oft-quoted, arguably little-understood apothegm signalling that moment when the former gives way to the latter—Vox Populi Vox Dei was the title of Robert Ferguson’s Whig tract of 1709, later reprinted as The Judgment of Whole Kingdoms and Nations, and making the case for political legitimacy as residing in the people. Now I suppose we could think of this as just another—briefer—way of expressing the same nexus of points Taylor is making. Authority resides in something extrinsic to humanity, and then a change happens and the authority is now located in something intrinsic. But I wonder if all the stuff about efficient causes, discipline, Stoicism and Deism not only muddies a simpler narrative, but actually diverts what was going on into something like a misapprehension.
Once upon a time
people maximised their options for flourishing by living under a strictly
hierarchical social system—because baseline social wealth was subsistence-level,
such that small shocks tumbled everyone into chaos, say, and so extreme
measures to try and establish order were welcomed—but now we maximise our
options for flourishing by actualising systems in which power is more diffusely
spread around a greater number of people.
And there’s more, here (isn't there?). To quote Braddick again, grounding
society in a political logic of ‘Legitimation’ entails three distinct but
connected things: ‘legal validity; the justifiability of the regime in terms of
the beliefs and values current in the given society; and the evidence of
consent derived from actions taken to be expressive of it’ [Braddick, p.69]. I
think that’s right, but I also find it hard to map those three things—respect
for a kind of abstracted principle of ‘Law’, consistency with ‘beliefs and
values’, and Consent—onto Taylor’s
Stocism-Deism pathway. A Secular Age suggests that ‘discipline’ emerged from a shift of emphasis from transcendent to
[1]
Men whose number included Jacques Hébert and Antoine-François Momoro,
who attempted to use the revolution not just to break the power of the Catholic
hierarchy in France, but to banish Christianity altogether and replace it with a Deist
‘Religion of Reason’—except that this new Deist religion, established in 1793 with a
nationwide festival, proved so unpopular Hébert and Momoro were actually
guillotined in 1794. By 1801 Napoleon had banned the Religion of Reason, and
France reverted to the old ways. Neither individual is in Taylor’s index.
Adam, you write of Taylor's "account of how modern, secular society—how the modern, secular state—emerged out of earlier, religiously framed social structures, I started to wonder if something was missing." But isn't the question of how modern, secular society arose somewhat distinct from the question of how the modern, secular state arose? And isn't Taylor's inquiry focused on the former rather than the latter — the Modern Moral Order as opposed to the Modern Political Order? I see Taylor's book as being phenomenological rather than political, focused on the structures of experience rather than the structures of the social-political order. Obviously these are interlocking and mutually interactive developments, but it does seem justifiable to study the first without needing to account for the second.
ReplyDelete(In one book, I mean. I do like, though, how your critique, if taken seriously, would require Taylor's 900-page book to be much, much longer than it is.)
DeleteThis is, I accept, an important distinction. Which is to say it's a distinction important to lots of people nowadays, in terms of their lived experience, in which society (family, friends, church, fandoms) is seen as different to, and sometimes in direct conflict with, political power. But that's not universal, is it? Nikolai Rostov, going off to fight in the war in Tolstoy (I'm thinking of the scene in which he sees the Tsar faroff and experiences a total. quasi-erotic identification with him, desiring to die so that the Tsar could see his sacrifice etc) wouldn't understand that distinction, I think; nor would the enthusiastic German patriot under Nazism, or various people living under populist-patriotic governance nowadays. But this is a weak kind of response to your objection here, which is a strong one.
DeleteYou’re absolutely right that the distinction is not universal, and I suspect that Taylor would join Habermas in seeing the rise in the West of the “public sphere” — the world of coffee-houses and stock markets and periodical journalism and publishing houses — as a kind of ever-evolving complement/rival to the official political order, and the sphere within which the Modern Moral Order is developed, articulated, and debated. Closely related: A rather astonishing amount of work has been done in recent decades, starting with Robert Danton I suppose, on the relationship between the history of the book and political history; if I had another life to spare I’d love to plunge deeply into those resources. But alas.
DeleteAlso: One could make the argument, using some of the examples that you give in your post, that one of the chief goals of the French Revolution was to eliminate this distinction between the State and the public sphere, wholly absorbing the second into the first — and perhaps further that this goal explains both the Terror and the inevitable failure of the Revolution to sustain itself in/as a nation-state. Perhaps no state in the Western-public-sphere line of descent can survive without those very social institutions it often perceives as its enemy. (Where would Trump be without the New York Times and CNN? Where would Boris be without the BBC and the Guardian?) Only where those developments did not happen (e.g. China) is it possible for the state to exist without the rival/complement of the public sphere. Just a thought, not (yet) a claim.
DeleteThat seems to me a very persuasive thesis, I must say. Its hard to deny, for instance, that the reason Napoleon succeeded (in French political, if not ultimately in international military, terms) is that he was able to draw on a sort of doubled legitimacy: he could plausibly claim to be carrying on the principles of the Revolution at the same time as he could plausibly claim as emperor to be embodying the ancient patriotic Catholic essence of France.
DeleteIt occurs to me that Brexit, which has ground miserably on for years now, is distorting my sense of all this. For a long time, up to the vote and for a period afterwards I assumed this was a matter of state economic policy only, and could be discussed and debated on those terms (it seemed to me very damaging economically, something which events so far have rather confirmed). But soon enough it became clear that for a large tranche of Brexit supporters it was much more intestinal than that, and all sorts of things very far removed from dry economic strategy are tangled up in it: people cathect their (personal) sense of power and control over their lives into it, it has become an iteration of patriotic identity, a congeries of pride, defiance, bulldog spirit and so on, operating beyond rationality and so unmoveable by reason and logic. It's been odd and not comfortable living in the middle of all this, I can tell you.
Delete(Which is to say: I assumed Brexit was a secular matter but it has revealed itself to be, in an important sense, a religious one. And since Brexit has swallowed my polity whole, and since we will evidently continue to live in its belly for years to come, this leads me to question the secularity I had assumed as the order of UK politics)
DeleteThis is precisely what Durkheim explains! It all circles back!
Delete