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The concept of legitimacy has become impoverished in recent political discourse, due partly to the influence of Max Weber's conception of it as residing solely in public acceptance. This interpretation abandons the early liberal conception, which had strong normative implications & permitted an assessment of a regime's concept of legitimacy independent of popular consent; the decay of this principle is a source of contemporary legitimation problems to which most contemporary theorists are blind. The classical theory of liberal individualism sought to legitimize the state, civil society, & the patriarchal family. These beliefs supported later struggles against patriarchy, slavery, & capitalism. Bureaucratization has undermined contractarian individualism in all three institutions. A basis for reconstructing the concept of legitimacy can be found in the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the establishment of institutionalized power, despite certain flaws in his specific proposals. W. H. Stoddard.

The significance of a recent work by Quentin Skinner (The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols, Cambridge: 1978) for current Anglo-American political theory is examined critically. This work, a history of Renaissance & Reformation political thought, makes several claims: that the meaning of a text is what the author consciously intended; that texts must be dealt with as codified objects produced in a context of extra-textual conventions; & that the goal of reading a text is to recover the mentalite it embodies. This approach ignores the existence of unconscious meanings in human acts & statements, the contrast between subjective & objective meanings, the existence of unintended consequences of actions, & the situation of present interpreters in their own historical context. Further, it excludes considerations of power, interest, & self-deception from the reading of past texts, treating political discourse as fully conscious & revealing of its own intentionality. W. H. Stoddard.