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Legitimacy is "a value whereby something or someone is recognized and accepted as right and proper". [6] In political science, legitimacy has traditionally been understood as the popular acceptance and recognition by the public of the authority of a governing régime, whereby authority has political power through consent and mutual understandings, not coercion.
This theory of consent is starkly contrasted with the divine right of kings and has often been invoked against the legitimacy of colonialism. Article 21 of the United Nations' 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government".
With respect to political theory, a state is perceived as being legitimate when its citizens treat it as properly holding and exercising political power. [7] [8] While the term exists beyond the political realm, as it encompasses sociology, philosophy, and psychology, legitimacy is often referred to with respect to actors, institutions, and the political orders they constitute. [3]
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While the monopoly on violence as the defining conception of the state was first described in sociology by Max Weber in his essay Politics as a Vocation (1919), [1] the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force is a core concept of modern public law, which goes back to French jurist and political philosopher Jean Bodin's 1576 work Les ...
In the period of the eighteenth century, usually called the Enlightenment, a new justification of the European state developed.Jean-Jacques Rousseau's social contract theory states that governments draw their power from the governed, its 'sovereign' people (usually a certain ethnic group, and the state's limits are legitimated theoretically as that people's lands, although that is often not ...
Political philosophy, or political theory, is the philosophical study of government, addressing questions about the nature, scope, and legitimacy of public agents and institutions and the relationships between them.
Thus this theory can be sometimes viewed as part of the social evolutionism theory. In traditional authority, the legitimacy of the authority comes from tradition , in charismatic authority from the personality and leadership qualities of the individual ( charisma ), and in legal (or rational-legal) authority from powers that are ...