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201                        Legitimation  Problems  in  the  Modern  State

         “‘critical-normative  demarcation  of  legitimacy  from  illegitimacy”’
         to  be  absolutely  necessary.  But  he  does  not  specify  the  procedures
         or  the  criteria  for  this  demarcation.  He  mentions  legitimacy  fac-
         tors:  personal  esteem,  efficiency  in  managing  public  tasks,  ap-
         proval  of  structures.  But  this  personal  authority  is  supposed  to
         “spring  from  sources  that  can’t  be  rationally  grounded.”  What
         can  count  as  efficient  task  management  is  measured  against  stan-
         dards.  These  in  turn  are  connected  with  those  structures  about
         whose  legitimacy  Hennis  says  only  that  they  establish  themselves
         in  different  national  variants.  He  does  not  say  what  can  count  as
         a  ground  for  the  legitimacy  of  domination.  To  do  so  requires  a
         concept  of  legitimacy  with  normative  content.  Hennis  does  not
         present  us  with  such  a  concept,  but  he  must  have  one,  at  least
         implicitly,  in  mind.  The  old-European  style  to  his  strategy  of
         argumentation  leads  me  to  suspect  connections  with  the  classical
         doctrine  of  politics.
           In  this  tradition  (which  goes  back  to  Plato  and  Aristotle)
         stand  important  authors  who  still  possess  a  substantial  concept  of
         morality,  normative  concepts  of  the  good,  of  the  public  welfare,
         and  so  on.*?  Neo-Aristotelianism  in  particular  experienced  a
         renaissance  in  the  writings  of  Hannah  Arendt,  Leo  Strauss,
         Joachim  Ritter,  and  others.  The  very  title  under  which  Ritter
         published  his  studies  of  Aristotle,  “Metaphysics  and  Politics,”
         suggests  the  difficulty  of  their  position.  Classical  natural  law  is  a
         theory  dependent  on  world  views.  It  was  still  quite  clear  to
         Christian  Wolff  at  the  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century  that
         practical  philosophy  ‘‘presupposes  in  all  its  doctrines  ontology,
         natural  psychology,  cosmology,  theology,  and  thus  the  whole  of
         metaphysics.’’  #8  The  ethics  and  politics  of  Aristotle  are  unthink-
         able  without  the  connection  to  physics  and  metaphysics,  in  which
         the  basic  concepts  of  form,  substance,  act,  potency,  final  cause,
         and  so  forth  are  developed.  As  Ritter  puts  it,  in  the  polzs  that
         which  is  “by  nature  right”  is  realized  because  ‘‘with  the  polzs  the
         nature  of  man  comes  to  its  realization...  whereas  otherwise,
         where  there  is  no  polzs,  man  can  exist  as  man  only  in  possibility
         but  not  in  actuality.”  *°  Today  it  is  no  longer  easy  to  render  the
         approach  of  this  metaphysical  mode  of  thought  plausible.  It  is
         no  wonder  that  the  neo-Aristotelian  writings  do  not  contain  sys-
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