Obstacles to the Establishment of Political Legitimacy in Communist Poland

Paul G. Lewis

British Journal of Political Science, 1982, vol. 12, issue 2, 125-147

Abstract: Legitimacy may be defined as that political condition in which power-holders are able to justify their holding of power in terms other than those of the mere fact of power-holding. According to one view such justifications are increasingly tenuous due to the conditions under which the modern state has arisen and the means it employs in order to persist. Theories of legitimacy typically view power from two aspects – from that of its origins and from that of its ends. More concretely, this invariably involves, on the one hand, some discussion of the degree to which a regime of a government.can be said to rest on democratic consent and, on the other, of the extent to which the regime or government guides its actions by some notion of the common good or public interest. Neither of these focuses, in Schaar's view, are likely to provide adequate justifications for power under modern conditions: ‘criticism and hard events have done their work: both concepts have been reduced to rubble’.

Date: 1982
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