Your Email:

Subject:

Message:
Entry: Who Are We? Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/who_are_we#26410 Post contents: Another word on legitimacy: As Weber's student Carl Schmitt pointed out, democracy (as opposed to classical liberalism) is the only recognized form of legitimacy for Western governments today. That's as true now as when he wrote _The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy_ in the 1920s. So if we use Mr. Bramwell's "empirical" definition of legitimacy, then Western political conservatives will, by definition, defend democratic ("legitimate"), as opposed to classical liberal, institutions. Schmitt's conception of democracy was very different from what he called "mass democracy", but it was not what most of us would call conservative either. Sent at: 2008 09 07