Page 203 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

180 Communication and Evolution of Society

of domination to which the society gives over the function of
intervening when its integrity is threatened.* The state does not,
it is true, itself establish the collective identity of the society; nor
can it itself carry out social integration through values and norms,
which ate not at its disposition. But inasmuch as the state assumes
the guarantee to prevent social disintegration by way of binding
decisions, the exercise of state power is tied to the claim of main-
taining society in its normatively determined identity. The legiti-
macy of state power is then measured against this; and it must
be recognized as legitimate if it is to last.
In more recent theories of political development, which attempt
to explain the emergence of the modern state, securing identity,
procuring legitimation, and social integration are listed as general
system problems.* Of course, the systems-theoretic reformulation
of these concepts conceals the connection that is constitutive for
political domination. The political subsystem takes on the task of
protecting society from disintegration; but it cannot freely dispose
of the capacities of social integration or of the definitional power
through which the identity of the society is fixed. At the evolu-
tionary stage of societies organized through a state, different
forms of identity have developed: the empire, the city state, the
nation state. These are, to be sure, only compatible with certain
types of political domination, but they do not coincide with them.
A world empire, a polis, a medieval commune, a nation—these
express the connection of different political orders with different
forms of life (ethos) .* Thus modernization research ts correct in
taking state-building and nation-building as two different, if in-
terdependent, processes.
The restriction of the category of legitimacy to societies orga-
nized through a state is not trivial. This conceptual specification
has empirical implications; I would like to mention the follow-
ing points.

a. If we equate legitimate power with political domination, we have
to maintain, among other things, that no political system can succeed
in permanently securing mass loyalty—that is, its members’ willingness
to follow—without recourse to legitimations. In the many-sided discus-
sion of Max Weber's type of legal domination, which is supposed to
legitimize itself solely through technical procedures, only Carl Schmitt