The Concept of Legitimation in the 'New Politics of Hard Times': Reviewing Old Debates in State Theory

This conceptual paper serves a triple purpose. It will first reconstruct the concept of legitimation as used in theories of the democratic capitalist state during the 1970s. Then the concept of legitimation figured prominently in neo-Marxist debates on the theory of the capitalist state. Indeed, some of the more promising accounts of crisis politics -- by authors like Claus Offe, James O'Connor or Alan Wolfe -- were centerred around the very notion of the "legitimation function" of the state, typically in relation to its "accumulation function". The paper will also related those conceptions of legitimation to both the classical notion by Weber and later refinements by authors like Beetham or Scharpf. Secondly, the new politics of austerity that we are currently witnessing seem to provide a fertile ground for applying that concept again -- with the hope of contributing both to a better understanding of the crisis and the politics it has produced AND to a more refined concept of legitimation that takes democracy more seriuously than was the case in the 1970s. Thus, I will attempt to develop a concept of legitimation that might be usefully applied in the analysis of current devlopments in Europe and beyond. Thirdly,it seems that institutional politics (or, more precisely, the politics of institutional reform) is increasingly replacing distributive patterns of 'legitimation-gathering' that prevailed in the 'golden years' of the welfare state. The paper will seek to answer the question to what extent this is mere symbolic politics or whether it really entails an opportunity for more participation and more contestation, that is, for a more democratic form of government.