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Discuss the ‘crisis of legitimacy’ in capitalist societies. (Habermas) (UPSC CSE Mains 2015- Political Science and International Relations, Paper 1)
- In his work, Legitimation Crisis (1973), Habermas identified the difficulties called ‘crisis tendencies’ within capitalist societies. These crisis tendencies emerged as a result of a fundamental contradiction between the logic of capitalist accumulation and popular pressures unleashed by democratic politics.
- Capitalist societies, based on the pursuit of profit and producing class inequalities, have to sustain political stability by invoking a normal claim to rule. In such a system, legitimacy is secured by democratic processes, which lead to further demands for social welfare provisions, increased popular participation and social equality. This in turn puts pressures on the state to expand its social responsibilities, and raises demands for state intervention for removing inequalities, forcing it to increase expenditure on welfare (non-profit) measures. These pressures lead to increase in taxation and public spending, and constrain capitalist accumulation by restricting profit levels and discouraging enterprise. Forced either to resist popular pressures or risk economic collapse, such societies find it increasingly difficult and eventually impossible, to maintain legitimacy.
- Thus, a capitalist society is constantly in the grip of crisis tendencies, which test its ability to sustain itself through the legitimacy that it can elicit through various democratic institutions. While investing in such legitimation measures, the capitalist system has to be also on a constant alert to see that these processes are not stretched to the limit where they dismantle the defining principles of the capitalist system i.e. a class exploitative system geared to the extraction of profit or capital accumulation.
- According to Habermas, capitalist democracies cannot permanently satisfy both popular demands for social equality and welfare rights and requirements of a market economy based on private profit. The implication of such ‘crises’ involves a disturbance of integration or cohesion of society and the regulatory structures of the capitalist system.
- In such scenarios of legitimation crisis, the modern state, according to Habermas, takes recourse simultaneously to ‘system steering’ and ideological measures to legitimize and stabilize the existing structures. This involves an ‘uncoupling’ or dissociation of the economic (wage labour and capital relations) and the political spheres (institutions of governance). This means that the exploitative relationship between wage labour and capital is no longer part of the political sphere. The political sphere in turn becomes less participatory and more impersonal, bureaucratised, and distanced from the ruled. Such a system would, however, be held together ideologically by legitimizing ‘universalist’ discourses of rights, justice and citizenship which give the rulers the moral claim to rule.
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