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>You're arguing ... legitimacy is significantly a function of the execution of power against part of the populace. I was not advocating anything, merely descri

>You're arguing ... legitimacy is significantly a function of the execution of power against part of the populace. I was not advocating anything, merely describing what often goes undescribed. Further, I wasn't arguing from where the legitimacy emerges, only that it exists, and that that extant legitimacy, coupled with the extant power and willingness to engage in otherwise-criminal acts is what makes a government a government. Take away one or the other and we wouldn't call it a government. >I quite like rule-of-law states Here ya go, a long but rather good piece written by a former professor of mine: http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm

com 16y ago
I'm sorry if "arguing" means "advocating" to you, my meaning was that the conclusion that you reached was an extreme end of a continuum. Decrease one or the other and you can still call it a government for many possible points on the continuum. Thanks for the article, it was quite interesting as I don't have a US background. I was a bit surprised that the author thought that people might assume that a system of explicit rules, judgements and binding agreements could be anything other than political in practice. We use language to create these legal instruments, and interpret them as language users in a community, each of us with our own interests. Politics is what we call this interpretation, negotiation and transformation process. But the fact that there is a political process (whether you agree about the current scope of these state-sanctioned instruments, or whether you'd prefer that civil society manintains them instead) is a classic marker of a rule of law society: totalitarianism, as the extremis case you describe, has very little of this political process and for very good reasons - it's not necessary in the broad.

com 16y ago

I'm sorry if "arguing" means "advocating" to you, my meaning was that the conclusion that you reached was an extreme end of a continuum. Decrease one or the other and you can still call it a government for many possible points on the continuum. Thanks for the article, it was quite interesting as I don't have a US background. I was a bit surprised that the author thought that people might assume that a system of explicit rules, judgements and binding agreements could be anything other than political in practice. We use language to create these legal instruments, and interpret them as language users in a community, each of us with our own interests. Politics is what we call this interpretation, negotiation and transformation process. But the fact that there is a political process (whether you agree about the current scope of these state-sanctioned instruments, or whether you'd prefer that civil society manintains them instead) is a classic marker of a rule of law society: totalitarianism, as the extremis case you describe, has very little of this political process and for very good reasons - it's not necessary in the broad.