Beliefs in Legitimacy and the Normative Role of Coherence

Recent contributions in political philosophy have shown that political realism does not need to renounce to a normative account of legitimacy, although claiming the autonomy of the political from the moral sphere. The regime’s legitimacy, the argument goes, depends on the fulfilment of standards that are genuinely political, that is, they do not depend on prior moral considerations. Little attention, however, is payed to the beliefs-based character of legitimacy, especially in the version elaborated by Max Weber. More precisely, people’s beliefs seem to disappear when the theorists focus on the normative task of a realist account. In fact, the political theorist perspective appears to prevail over individuals’ beliefs. In contrast, I claim that individuals’ beliefs should be relevant elements in developing a realist conception of legitimacy. Indeed, they signal the true experience of individuals subjected to power, that is, subjected to the threat, or the actual use, of physical force by political authority. More precisely, my effort is to resist the tendency of eventually imposing the ‘superior’ perspective of the theorist, although still conceiving the possibility of an external critique. The aim of this paper is double: first, to illustrate what it means to have a belief in legitimacy for a subject exposed to the coercion exercised by the regime; second, to show that a belief in legitimacy intrinsically possesses normative features. As I will argue, the normativity of a beliefs-based account of legitimacy relies (among other elements) on the concept of coherence, which I conceive to be a minimum requirement individuals must respect when expressing their judgement about political authority. More specifically, I will claim that coherence is an internal standard; it prevents this account of legitimacy from collapsing into moralism, and from being imperative in imposing the theorist’s perspective. Furthermore, I will maintain that the implementation of a coherence test builds a bridge between internal individuals expressing standards and the external critique or, as I will phrase it, between internal and external individuals. Finally, I will show that the duty to be coherent implies further normative prescriptions, such as a duty to verify the consistency of our own beliefs, and, therefore, the duty to foster and participate to the public debate space. Accordingly, I will conceive a double-step external judgement: the regime is provisionally (il)legitimate whether the internal individuals pass the coherence test; it is fully (il)legitimate whether the internal individuals pass both the coherence and the public debate tests. In the first part of the paper, I will illustrate some aspects shared by Max Weber and Bernard Williams, as examples of beliefs-sensitive accounts of legitimacy. In the second part, I will suggest my conception of a belief in legitimacy. Having a belief in legitimacy means to believe that: 1. The regime has a feature x; 2. Feature x is positive for a regime to be legitimate; 3. Therefore, the regime is legitimate. In the third part, I will show how coherence works as a filter to the beliefs, and its normative implications.