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181 Legitimation Problems in the Modern State

and Niklas Luhmann come close to the position that in the modern
state decisions legally arrived at are accepted, so to speak, without
motives. On a somewhat different level we find the position that the
social integration achieved through values and norms and protected
by the authority of the state could in principle be replaced by system
integration, that is, by the latent functions of nonnormative social
structures (or mechanisms).> Corresponding to this is the assertion
that system performance can render representations of legitimacy su-
perfluous, that the neutrally observable efficiency of the state appar-
atus or of the economic system (and not only the efficiency perceived
and evaluated by participants) is effective for legitimation.6 These
assertions are incompatible with the proposed usage of the concept of
legitimacy.
b. Furthermore, according to this usage, problems of legitimacy are
not a specialty of modern times. The formulas of legitemum imperium
or legitimum dominium were widespread in Rome and in the Euro-
pean Middle Ages.* Political theories occupied themselves with the
issue of the rise and fall of legitimate domination, in Europe at
the latest since Aristotle, if not since Solon. And we can demonstrate
the existence of legitimacy conflicts themselves in all older civilizations,
even in archaic societies, when, in the wake of colonization, they col-
lide with conquerors from societies organized through states. In tra-
ditional societies, legitimation conflicts typically take the form of
prophetic and messianic movements that turn against the official ver-
sion of religious doctrine, which legitimates the state or a priestly
domination, the church or a colonial domination. In the process the
insurgents appeal to the original religious content of the doctrine—
examples would be the prophetic movements in Israel, the spread of
primitive Christianity in the Roman Empire, the heretical movements of
the Middle Ages up to the Peasants’ War, but also the messianic,
millenarian movements among indigenous populations who took the
religion of their colonial masters only to turn it against them, criticiz-
ing their legitimacy. V. Lanternari cites the revealing saying of a Zulu
prophet: “At first we had the land and you the Bible; now you have
the land and we are left with the Bible.’’ 9 I cannot understand how, in
the face of these world-wide phenomena, one could insist on reserving
legitimation problems to bourgeois society and the modern state.
c. I find even less comprehensible the assertion that legitimation
problems have nothing to do with class conflicts. With the differentia-
tion of a political control center, there arose the possibility of un-
coupling access to the means of production and appropriation of so-