Revisiting Legitimacy, Twenty Years On

Abstract

Since its publication in 1991, The Legitimation of Power with its distinctive framework for analysing legitimacy has been much quoted and used by other scholars, both in political science and in other disciplines, notably criminal justice and criminology. This chapter reviews the subsequent developments, clarifications and criticisms of this analytical framework. It uses the analytical framework of the book to examine the legitimacy crisis in the international financial sector, and the way this has come to be displaced onto democratic governments, especially in Europe, revealing the tensions that lie at the heart of both the democratic and the European projects. In conclusion, it is argued that the original framework offered in the book needs some refinement and updating, but that its overall method of analysing legitimacy still provides the best approach to understanding and using this crucial and much-debated concept.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 71 citations exist upstream.