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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-