Page 218 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

195 Legitimation Problems in the Modern State

in the fact that such things are expected of the state and that the
state has to take them up in a programmatic way. The conflict
—in which, with Claus Offe, we can see a source of legitimation
problems—lies rather in the fact that the state is supposed to
perform all these tasks without violating the functional condi-
tions of a capitalist economy, and this means without violating the
complementarity relations that exclude the state from the eco-
nomic system and, at the same time, also make it dependent on
the dynamic of the economy.*®
Viewed historically, the state was from the beginning supposed
to protect a society determined normatively in its identity from
disintegration, without ever having at its free disposal the capaci-
ties for social integration, without ever being able, as it were, to
make itself master of social integration. The modern state at first
fulfilled this function by guaranteeing the prerequisites for the
continued existence of a private economic system free of the state.
Disturbances and undesired side effects of the accumulation pro-
cess did not have to result in the withdrawal of legitimation so
long as the interests harmed could count as private interests and
be segmented. To the extent, however, that the capitalist eco-
nomic process penetrated ever broader areas of life and subjected
them to its principle of societal adaptation, the systemic character
of bourgeois society was consolidated. The interdependence of
conditions in these once-private domains increased the suscepti-
bility to disturbance and also gave these disturbances a politically
relevant scale. Thus the dysfunctional side effects of the economic
process could less and less be segmented from one another and
neutralized in relation to the state. From this there grew a general
responsibility of the state for deficrencies and a presumption of
its competence to eliminate them. This places the state in a di-
lemma. On the one hand, the definitions of deficiencies and
the criteria of success in dealing with them arise in the domain
of political goal-settings that have to be legitimated; for the
state has to deploy legitimate power if it takes on the catalog
of tasks mentioned above. On the other hand, in this matter the
state cannot deploy legitimate power in the usual way, to push
through binding decisions, but only to manipulate the decisions
of others, whose private autonomy may not be violated. Indirect