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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

T. H. Rigby
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Extract

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.

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , April 1984 , pp. 219 - 222
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

1 See Rigby, T. H. and Fehér, Perene, eds, Political Legitimation in Communist States (London: Macmillan, 1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Though some would still advocate this. See, e.g. L'Idée de la legitimité (vol. 7 of Annales de Philosophie Politique, Paris, 1967Google Scholar) and the special issue on legitimacy of the Politische Vierteljahresschrift, XVII (1976)Google Scholar, identified as Sonderheft 7.

3 Cf. Brie, Siegfried, Die Legitimation einer usupienen Staatsgewalt (Heidelberg, 1863)Google Scholar, Chap. 1.

4 The argument is briefly stated in Political Legitimation in Communist States, pp. 7–9.Google Scholar For an earlier discussion of this problem in Weber, see Rigby, T. H., ‘Max Weber's Typology of Authority: A Difficulty and some Suggestions’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, II (1966), 2–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Explaining the latest intensification of ideological indoctrination at the June 1983 plenary meeting of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee, General Secretary Andropov said that ‘however important the other questions that party committees are called upon to deal with may be, it is ideological work that advances more and more into the foreground’ (Pravda, 16 06 1983Google Scholar).

6 For a brief account of the ceremonial side of a Soviet party congress, see Miller, Robert F. and Rigby, T. H., The 26th Party Congress in Current Political Perspective (Canberra: The Australian National University, 1982)Google Scholar, Chap. 1.