Justification Crisis: A Deliberative-Democratic Critique of Faltering Hegemony

After the 2007/8 economic recession, many anticipated a “legitimation crisis” of neoliberal capitalism, which could provide new opportunities for a reassertion or even an expansion of social democracy. The developments that followed have greatly frustrated such hopes. Instead of a resurgence of socialist or democratic politics, what we see now is a wave of right-wing populism flooding the political systems of the U.S. and Europe. Applying Rainer Forst’s recent work to Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony, I argue we can speak of a “justification crisis” as a pathological form of legitimation crisis: it occurs when the hegemony of a prevailing narrative of justification begins to crumble, but the major institutions of society cannot marshal the resources necessary to generate an alternative. In this situation, the public sphere is too corrupted to facilitate deliberative processes of opinion and will-formation, while the mechanisms of aggregative democracy remain in place, leaving discontented citizens to vote on the basis of snap judgments and prejudices untested by criteria of reciprocal and general justification. This makes the political system prone to erratic decision-making, producing the “morbid symptoms” Gramsci considered typical of a crisis in which “the old is dying but the new cannot be born.”