Discuss the ‘crisis of legitimacy’ in capitalist societies. (Habermas) (2015, 20 Marks)
Jürgen Habermas, of the second-generation Frankfurt School, set out the thesis in Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus (1973; English Legitimation Crisis, 1975). Late capitalism, he argued, had not abolished crisis. It had moved crisis out of the economy into the state and culture. The danger was no longer a slump but the withdrawal of mass loyalty.
From Market Crisis to Crisis of Justification
- In liberal capitalism the market looked natural. The ideology of fair exchange justified class relations, and crises took an economic form.
- In late capitalism the state manages demand, subsidises, plans and provides welfare, taking on “market-replacing as well as market-supplementing tasks.” This repoliticises the class relation. Who gets what becomes a visible political decision, and it needs justifying.
- Formal democracy contains this through civil privatism. Citizens stay out of politics in return for career, consumption, leisure and welfare benefits. Legitimacy rests on material compensation rather than participation.
Four Crisis Tendencies
| Origin | Crisis | Shortfall |
|---|---|---|
| Economic system | Economic | Consumable value |
| Political system (output) | Rationality | Coherent steering decisions |
| Political system (input) | Legitimation | Generalised mass loyalty |
| Socio-cultural system | Motivation | Action-motivating meaning |
The state absorbs economic crisis but cannot reconcile what capital needs with what citizens are promised: a rationality crisis. Expectations rise with each election while the fiscal base narrows. Rolling back entitlements provokes protest; not rolling them back risks breakdown. A legitimation crisis follows, and the state cannot manufacture the belief it lacks: “There is no administrative production of meaning.” Beneath this lies a motivation crisis. Capitalism lives off pre-capitalist resources such as the work ethic, achievement ideology and the family, which its own individualism wears away and which it cannot regenerate.
Allied Diagnoses
- James O’Connor (The Fiscal Crisis of the State, 1973): the state must serve both accumulation and legitimation, and spending for both outruns revenue.
- Claus Offe (Contradictions of the Welfare State, 1984): “capitalism cannot coexist with, neither can it exist without, the welfare state.”
- From the right, Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington and Joji Watanuki (The Crisis of Democracy, 1975) saw the same symptom as democratic overload and prescribed the opposite cure: lower expectations.
Critiques
- The neo-liberal answer. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan did not win extra legitimation; they reduced the need for it. By withdrawing the state, they handed outcomes back to the market and depoliticised the economy.
- The crisis did not arrive as predicted. Welfare democracies survived the 1970s, and consumerism deepened civil privatism.
- Postponement, not refutation. Wolfgang Streeck (Buying Time, 2013) argues that the crisis was deferred through inflation, then public debt, then private debt, until 2008.
- Habermas’s own turn. The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) and Between Facts and Norms (1992) moved him from crisis theory to a discourse theory: law is legitimate when those affected could accept it in free rational discourse. The theory gained normative power but lost predictive power. Nancy Fraser added that his system–lifeworld split was blind to gender.
Contemporary Relevance
- The 2008 financial crisis repoliticised the economy in reverse: public bailouts for private losses. Greece then showed the whole sequence. Every austerity step was lawful, yet loyalty drained away.
- Populism (Brexit, 2016, and anti-establishment parties across Europe) looks like delayed withdrawal of mass loyalty from parties that no longer seem to decide anything.
Conclusion
Habermas misjudged the timing and form of the crisis, but his logic holds: a state that owns economic outcomes must justify them. Neo-liberalism deferred the bill by disowning responsibility, and the populist decade suggests it has come due. Administration cannot supply legitimacy; only public justification can.