Power and Its Need of Legitimation

In the first chapter I wrote about ‘power’ as if it were self-evident what it meant. But what is power, and why does it stand in need of legitimation? To answer these questions it will be necessary to make a clear separation between the concept of power and that of legitimacy. In practice such a separation will be artificial, since the interplay between power, rules and legitimating norms and actions typically constitutes a complex interrelationship, in which each element is affected by the others. Yet it is only by distinguishing them conceptually that we can come to understand the connection between them. Where the first chapter approached the subject of power through an analysis of legitimacy, the present one will provide an approach to legitimacy through the analysis of power. In doing so I shall aim to identify precisely what it is about power that calls for legitimation, which in turn explains the underlying structure of legitimacy that I outlined in the previous chapter.