Dominant and Subsidiary Modes of Political Legitimation in the USSR: A Comment on Christel Lane's Article

In: British journal of political science, Band 14, Heft 2, S. 219-222

Abstract

Perhaps we political scientists and sociologists should have left 'legitimacy' to the constitutional and international lawyers. Such a view is certainly suggested by the present cacophany of our definitions, taxonomies and applications of the term. When the contributors to a book on political legitimation in communist states, representing by no means the full range of scholarly views on the social and political systems of these countries, can variously characterize the political legitimation of the USSR today as dominated by 'goal-rational', 'traditional' or 'paternalistic' legitimation, or as a combination of 'heteronomous-teleological' and 'autonomous-consensual' or of 'overt' and 'covert' modes of legitimation, we evidently have a long way to go before our shared understandings of political legitmation could be adequate for the comparative study of political systems or for analysing political change.