Although the notion of legitimacy appeared in the political vocabulary of Western Europe as a counterrevolutionary slogan, it soon became detached from such origin. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Max Weber voiced a broad, social-scientific understanding of the concept, by equating the problem of legitimacy with the question of «the ultimate grounds of the validity of a domination». But where do these «ultimate grounds» come from? Are they a product of the political process itself or do they stem from a superior right which sustains and justifies political authority from without?
By comparing and contrasting Weber’s concept of charisma as the original source of legitimacy with both Hans Kelsen’s theory of democracy and Carl Schmitt’s political theology, this paper aims to tell the story of a controversy on the very nature of political legitimacy in a specific late-modern context of rapid, but contested, secularization, where the domains of politics had not yet been entirely severed from concerns pertaining to religious salvation.
In its final section, the paper reflects upon possible lessons to be drawn from this early twentieth-century controversy to contemporary debates on legitimacy and authority, where the tension between transcendence and immanence seems to have been resolved – at least in the West and even if only transiently – in favor of the latter.
