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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 27, No. 2. 1964.

Legitimate Power Comes Slowly

Legitimate Power Comes Slowly

"What happens when you have no ark of the covenant?" Prof. Pocock, Professor of Political Science at Canterbury University posed this question at the annual University Congress at Curious Cove. He was discussing the "politics of illegitimacy"; the need for new states to find some factor which made their power legitimate. Legitimacy, said Pocock, is the factor in Government which need not be questioned and which provides a reason for accepting the power of that Government.

Prof. Pocock distinguished between legitimacy and legitimism, As an example of legitimism he cited the attempts of the Congress of Vienna to restore the former French dynastic monarchies which were "traditional, familiar and accustomed."

There were three major doetrines relating to the founding of a state, held Prof. Pocock. There was the theory of natural law which claimed it was in the natural character of men to agree, there was the authoritarian school which regarded the results of its coercive measures as legitimacy. The other theory was that of the inherently dynamic leader, who had appeared in Greek and Roman times as well as our own. He remarked that "what the Greeks called heroes we called charismatic leaders, and what the Romans called deification we called the personality cult."

The Anglo-American societies were conservative regarding legitimacy, said Pocock, because they assumed that it already existed. They believed that legitimacy came as the result of long processes largely outside human control. The tragedy of a revolution was that it must legitimise itself as it went along. Its participants were "like players who have to invent the rules as they play a game of life and death."

In a revolution a small elite seize the process of modernisation. A nostalgic image of the peasants as being "innocent and spontaneous, free from the stresses and strains, doubts and displacements which torment the elite, is constructed." This is linked with the image of aroused and dynamic masses advancing their state towards Utopia, and commonly manifests itself in the phrase "the people." Seen as a nation "the people" gives you nationalism, as peasants and workers gives the populist form of socialism, and as the proletariat with its historical destiny, gives Marxism-Leninism, "which is populism in its most armour-plated form."

This revolutionary myth is incarnate in the charismatic leader, who often shares power with the traditional rulers of a professional army. This goes hand in hand with a growing bureacracy who Want to institutionalise the myth and turn it into a means of legitimacy.

Prof. Pocock concluded by suggesting there was a parallel between the rise of non-western elite groups impatient of modernisation within the traditional structure and the barbarians seizing power in Europe.