Page 216 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

193 Legitimation Problems in the Modern State

ists, Poles, and Catholics—no longer reflected the legitimacy thematic
of the bourgeois state in its formative period; rather it now reflected
the legitimacy conflicts into which this state fell when it became clear
that modern bourgeois society did not dissolve class structures but first
gave them pure expression as socioeconomic class structures.*4 This
shock became permanent in the face of the threat to legitimacy repre-
sented since the nineteenth century, by the international labor move-
ment.
Up to this point we have discussed legitimation themes that
emerged with the development of the capitalist mode of produc-
tion and the establishment of the modern state. They are an
expression of legitimation problems on a scale that remains hidden
so long as one limits oneself, as Hennis does, to the few parapets
of the class struggle, the few historically significant legitimation
crises, to the bourgeois revolutions. The extent of what has to be
legitimated can be surmised only if one contemplates the vestiges
of the centuries-long repressions, the great wars, the small in-
surrections and defeats, that lined the path to the modern state.
I am thinking, for example, of the resistance to what moderniza-
tion research calls “penetration” (the establishment of adminis-
trative power)—hunger revolts when the food supply broke
down, tax revolts when public exploitation became unbearable,
revolts against the conscription of recruits, and so forth. These
local insurrections against the offshoots of the modern state
trickled away in the nineteenth century.*® They were replaced by
social confrontations of artisans, industrial workers, the rural
proletariat. This dynamic produced new legitimation problems.
The bourgeois state could not rely on the integrative power of
national consciousness alone; it had to try to head off the conflicts
inherent in the economic system and channel them into the po-
litical system as an institutionalized struggle over distribution.
Where this succeeded, the modern state took on one of the forms
of social welfare state-mass democracy.

IV
4. In regard to the legitimation problems in developed capital-
ist societies, I would like to make only a few remarks concerning
a) a fundamental conflict which today gives rise to legitimation