Page 214 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

Igt Legitimation Problems in the Modern State

periphery territorially not precisely determined—only through
incorporation, tributary subjugation, and association. The identity
of such empires had to be anchored internally in the consciousness
of only a small elite; it could coexist with other loosely integrated,
prestate identities of archaic origin. The emergence of nations
shows how this kind of collective identity was transformed under
the pressure of the modern state structure. The nation is a (not
yet adequately analyzed) structure of consciousness that satisfies
at least two imperatives. First, it makes the formally egalitarian
structures of bourgeois civil law (and later of political democ-
racy) in internal relations subjectively compatible with the par-
ticularistic structures of self-assertion of sovereign states in ex-
ternal relations. Second, it makes possible a high degree of social
mobilization of the population (for all share in the national
consciousness ). The French Revolution provides a model case for
this; the nation emerged along with the bourgeois constitutional
state and universal conscription.
I have recalled the structures of state and nation building be-
cause they can help decode the legitimation themes that accom-
panied the formation of the bourgeois state. If for the sake of
simplicity we restrict ourselves to controversies concerning the
theory of the state, we can (very roughly) distinguish five com-
plexes.*° These thematic strata run through several centuries. The
first two reflect the constitution of the new level of justification,
the other three the structures of the modern state and the nation.

a. Secularization. With the functional specification of the tasks of
public administration and government, there developed a concept of
the political that called for politically immanent justification. Detach-
ing the legitimation of state power from religious traditions thus be-
came a controversy of the first order. So far as I can see, Marsilius of
Padua (drawing on Aristotle in his Defensor Pacis of 1324) was one
of the first, if not the first, to criticize the theory of translatio imperiz
and thereby all theological justification! This controversy extended
into the nineteenth century, when conservative theoreticians such as
De Bonald and De Maistre once again sought to ground religiously
the traditional powers of church, monarchy, and a society of estates.
b. Rational Law. The great controversy between rational natural
law and classical natural law, the effects of which also reached into