From politics to democracy? Bernard Williams’ basic legitimation demand in a radical realist lens

Political realists argue that political norms can more effectively guide judgment than can ideal norms derived from ethical principles. Three axioms shape the realist conceptualization of political norms: (a) Politics arises with the displacement of violent coercion by order and, so, authority. (b) Such authority needs a decision rule or rules. Historically, in Western states (“now and around here,” as put by Bernard Williams (2005, 8)), two such rules obtain. One (b₁) is based on bargaining, whereby actors seek a mutually beneficial agreement that entails minimal concession, the other on deliberation (b₂), whereby actors recognize a common end to pursue, taking as given relevant value differences and interests. (c) Political norms are an emergent property of the subsumption of moral values to the prudential considerations of actors involved in sustaining the step from (a) to (b).

Realists have thus far focused on normative theorizing from the axioms through the lens of legitimacy (Cozzaglio & Greene, 2019; Cross, 2021; Rossi, 2012; Sigwart, 2013; Sleat, 2014). They have had little to say about the relationship, if any, between norms associated with (liberal) legitimacy and with democracy. This has led to claims that the new realism has little to offer democratic theory (e.g., Frega, 2020). Interestingly, Williams gestured toward theorizing such a relationship. However, he did not fully elaborate his ideas. He not only claims that “[a]ny theory of modern [legitimacy] requires an account of democracy and political participation” (15) and that “it is a manifest fact—that some kind of democracy, participatory politics at some level, is a feature of [legitimacy] for the modern world” (17). At least implicitly, he also saw his account of liberal legitimacy and linked theory of the establishment of politics as a framework for “exploring what more radical and ambitious forms of participatory or deliberative democracy are possible …” (2005, 17). Taking our cue from Williams, we here begin to clarify the relationship between norms formed through the establishment of politics, we sometimes shorten as "politicization,"¹ and those through democratic agency. Motivation arises from our suspicion that Williams’ theorization of the establishment of politics—creating a normative requirement that states satisfy a “basic legitimation demand (BLD),” wherein its authority is justified “to each subject” (4)—stands in tension with his commitment to conceptualizing political norms in historical context and, so, genealogically (2002, 20ff; also, 2006, 156). We show that Williams’ account of the norms that coincide with the establishment of politics—to whit, the step from (a) to (b) above—should not be read as also necessarily encompassing the establishment of conditions for the deepening of democracy.

In Section 2, we problematize further Williams’ argument. Insofar as he envisions democracy as a deepening of liberal political legitimacy, we claim that he makes it difficult to distinguish conceptually between legitimation-based and democracy-based norms. He implicitly ties the (legitimate) use of state authority to the defense of individual autonomy grounded in “negative” freedom from (illegitimate) state coercion. We counter that the normativity associated with democracy involves a different kind of autonomy, grounded by the “republican” organized aspiration to self-government (de Dijn, 2020). If democracy is essentially “people power” (not “people's rule/rule by the people,” see Ober, 2017, 22ff.), the normativity derived from it should at the minimum be oriented to checking predation by elites² and erecting barriers to elites’ overwhelming capacity to realize durable long-term political goals. This view synthesizes John P. McCormick's and others’ “Machiavellian” or “democratic republicanism” (2011; also Hamilton, 2014; del Lucchese, 2015; Pedullà, 2018; Raimondi, 2018) with Ober's minimal definition (2017) of democracy.

In Section 3, we draw on select works in the political sociology of citizenship, political–economic history, and republican historiography. We show how Williams’ treatment of the historical conditions that did sustain successful politicization “around here” fails to provide a clear account of processes that once, in the mid-twentieth century, sustained the moderately successful democratization of politics. In particular, Williams’ lack of clarity on the distinction that is our concern limits our ability to appraise the “erosion” of democracy “now”, that is, over the late twentieth and into the twenty-first century. In Section 4, we demonstrate the usefulness of maintaining a stricter distinction than Williams allows by elaborating radical realist conceptual resources in a manner sufficient to disentangle the establishment of politics from democracy. We posit that the former creates the demand for justification as producing liberal “legitimations,” whereby the powerful justify their authority, largely by implementing legal rights, to those controlling power resources sufficient to maintain status as “relatively free and equal individuals.” The latter is produced where nominally weak individuals, organized into groups, motivate forbearance on the part of the powerful. This radical realist derivation of concepts from historical context, we argue, better differentiates politicization from democratization. To the extent that Western states do justify themselves to each subject, this is a side-effect of what Jeffrey A. Winters (2011) describes as the historical process of taming oligarchs. At best, the offer of a justification to each subject is the product of historical conflict between few and many. At worst, no justification is offered to individuals or collectives, yet politics persists.

In Section 5, we describe some implications for realist political theory and forinterpretive political science amidst the current “crises of democracy” (Przeworski, 2019, 9, who also questions the usefulness of the legitimacy norm, 12ff.). Whereas interpretivists connect de-politicization to technocracy and populism (e.g., Bickerton & Invernizzi Accetti, 2021; Müller, 2021; Urbinati, 2019), we argue that doing so misses something. This is the de-democratizing impact of conditions in which we can observe a deepening of politics that remains in accord with the logic of Williams’ justification-to-each-subject norm of legitimacy. We thus expand on the historians’ observation that the “democratic features [of Western states] began to unravel in the 1970s” (Thompson, 2022, 200) under pressure from elite cohorts (esp., Gerstle, 2022, esp. 120, 184). We thus make two contributions: first, a novel reading of Williams that should speak to realist and generic political theory audiences and interpretivists alike; second, a radical realist reading of the role played by legitimation in the establishment of politics, which delineates more clearly the prospects for democracy today. We thus contribute to further distinguishing realism and its radical strand as distinct approaches that, contrary to detractors, can and do encompass democratic normativity.

For Williams, “our” modern states embody the conceptual political form of authority. Modern authority “requires … that there is a legitimation offered which goes beyond the assertion of power” (11). Williams expands by modifying Hobbes’ “state of nature” thought experiment (2005, 3). The establishment of politics depends on a claimant to authority “meeting the BLD[, which] implies a sense in which the state has to offer a justification of its power to each subject” (4, on the complexity of the relationship between conceptual, normative, and contextual elements in Williams’ schema, see Cross, 2019, 2021, 2022). For him, “we can recognize such a thing [the normativity of the BLD,] because in the light of the historical and cultural circumstances […] it MS [makes sense] to us as a legitimation” (11).

The idea is that, disenchanted with the hierarchical value system implicit in nonmodern holism, so rejecting “divine right” justifications, “we” individually (and autonomously) check whether an “intelligible order of authority makes sense to us as such a structure” (10). For Williams, the state

A legitimate order just is a formal political authority that does not “radically disadvantage” any individual or group of individuals (6). This is an explicitly historical claim: “There is no timeless, pre-political moral standard that determines to whom the BLD must be directed” (Hall, 2021, 145) or what radical disadvantage means. The normativity that the BLD inscribes in politics “now and around here,” including what any individual or group might define as radical disadvantage, “is a historical development” (145).

In a second step, Williams turns to the conditions for successfully meeting the BLD. For politics to be legitimate, the justifications offered to each subject presumably must be backed up. This is achieved insofar as justifications are accepted by a considerable number of subjects, “a substantial number of people” (2005, 136). Justifications therefore contextually “make sense” to each of us, as subjects of “this” authority. Williams’ working assumption seems to be that, given “our” social and cultural history, the rationales of legitimation that would convince “a substantial number of people” would have to be liberal (cf., 2005, 7–10). So, the modern Western state just is a liberal state, not least insofar as it is constituted to fulfill the normative goal to legitimate itself to each subject.

This claim to legitimacy is redeemable in terms of each subject's desire for autonomy from coercion by the state (Prinz & Rossi, 2017, 354–5). This desire can be reconstructed from Williams’ historical account of the conditions of legitimation for the modern state:

In other words, the legitimations appropriate to “our” modern state “make sense” because the justification is offered to “each subject” (4) and applies “all the time” (3). Sociologically speaking this subject, if not an out-and-out nonbeliever is at least a believer who grants equal status to both believers in other creeds and nonbelievers alike and, so, eschews hierarchical holism for egalitarian pluralism, or “individualism” (9). Such conditions also entail the dissolution of absolutism, wherein those bearing political authority dictate collective ends “down the chain” and the only role for an individual is to accept the directive, and include state-defense of the rule of law, wherein political authority reserves the sole right to arbitrate outcomes among divergent interest groups (albeit made up of individuals), which it compels to bargain or deliberate where the achievement of collective ends is at stake (effectively compelling (b₂), above). Modern conditions also include the institutionalization of a bureaucratic administrative apparatus, whereby the execution of processes oriented to achieving collective ends follows formal, impersonal rules, rather than the arbitrary whim of those bearing authority. These are the terms on which Williams connects legitimation with the sociological conditions of modernity (esp., 2005, 8–9, also 40ff.).

Conditions in which a justification only makes sense when offered to each subject need to be explained as historical conditions first and conceptual schema second. Indeed, this would accord with Williams’ methodological preferences (2002, 20ff., also, 2006, 156).⁴ We here synthesize an account of the establishment of politics (the steps from (a) to (b)) through the lens of the standard political sociological account of the permutations of modern citizenship, recent political history, and republican historiography.

We first take inspiration from the so-called “radical” (or “anarchic”) realist frame to construe politics more broadly than does Williams (esp. following Bull, 2019, 140, 184n.). We, therefore, build here on recent efforts that, by evaluating the effects on democracy of resurgent oligarchy (Arlen & Rossi, 2021), also challenge claims that there exists a tension between the demands of realism and norms of democracy (cf., Achen & Bartels, 2016; Frega, 2020). So, we interpret politics as that aspect of the human condition that encompasses “any … activity of structuring or directing or coordinating the actions of a group …” (Geuss, 2014, 147). Politics is neither a specific domain nor does it call for a definition (Williams agrees, this would prove “fruitless”, 2005, 12). Theorizing the establishment of politics involves considering potentially any coordinated contestatory interaction, be it dyadic, structural, or systemic.

This means that we modify Williams’ Hobbesian frame (see note 1.). We posit that to exercise raw power is to directly threaten: “Do this or else I will harm you,” but to exercise authority is merely to tie the threat to the offer of an alternative to being harmed: “Do this because I have the capacity to harm you” (paraphrasing Geuss, 2022, 44).⁷ Unlike the Hobbesian, this more or less Machiavellian formulation highlights a few salient facts. First, there can be no bright line regarding the contestation of relations of domination, apart from the “natural” distinction between a minority, which by virtue of some capacity to structure, direct, or coordinate “the actions of a group” can inflict harm, and a majority who, short of exercising “people power,” does not bear such structural, directing, or coordinating capacity. Second, an actor who contests domination provokes a response, and the nature of that response is out of their hands. A useful theory of politics therefore merely draws out the normative implications of human interactions, which are always conducted over time and in historical context (Raekstad, 2021). Rather than positing an immutable state form, on which is borne the norm of legitimacy, we follow Glen Newey to elucidate, as “artifacts” of “our” political culture, changes in “liberal acceptability-conditions” over time (2010, 449).

The radical lens, therefore, provides a basis for integrating into realist political theorizing the historical critique of the erosion of citizenship. To reiterate and expand, our view is that Williams artificially truncates the distinction between liberal and democratic normativity. This undermines prospects for conceptualizing what may be one of the most important ways in which modern individuals have sought to enter into bargaining and deliberative fora that shape the contents of order and scope of authority (again, the axiomatic step from (a) to (b)): via democratic agency. Given our view that democracy encompasses the power that groups of people exert when coordinating their activities to achieve a shared goal, such agency requires “solidarity.” “Now and around here” examples include acts of civil and uncivil disobedience; joining a labor union to achieve better conditions or increased wages; or other kinds of organized groups to protest the maldistribution of environmental harms or the corruption of regulatory capacity; refusing patriarchal rule-setting, cisgender, or ethno-racial privilege; standing for office, joining, canvassing for, or even simply working to “get out the vote” for a political party and so on. Democracy is in these terms essentially oriented toward but rarely achieves effective, let alone full, popular “control over the way one is governed” (de Dijn, 2020, 2).

As such, in the next section, we address our belief that Williams’ norm of legitimacy makes it difficult to diagnostically grapple with the empirical fact that politics can favor either unusually powerful individuals, elites, or individuals bound by circumstance to act in groups, in solidarity. Because he bakes individual autonomy into the establishment of politics, he also bakes-in the claim that such establishment depends on the justification-to-each-subject norm of legitimacy. This is so, even though historically speaking, Williams’ abstract subject possesses no power resources other than the capacity to band together in solidarity, bearing the aspiration to “have a say” in how authority is exercised and where it is headed. Radical realists can help us to see how this analytic entanglement, ironically, might make it difficult to say much about the relationship between the establishment of politics and democracy.

This radical realist conceptualization of politics provides the theoretical accompaniment to our historical–contextual and internal critique of Williams’ justification-offered-to-each-subject norm of (potentially more democratic) legitimacy. The establishment of politics is not a specific domain (circumscribed by a legitimate state that offers a justification to each subject). Rather, the establishment of politics is a process conducted over time and in historical context through which are generated normative implications for human interactions. If so, what the establishment of politics puts at stake first (for democrats) is not legitimacy but the terms on which elite forbearance is exacted, or acquiescence undertaken. Legitimation itself, insofar as it requires “relatively free and equal individuals,” may even hinder or undermine democratic power. This is what our synthesis of the revised citizenship narrative and Winters’ civil oligarchy thesis suggests has been the case, at least since the 1970s and increasingly so (more aggressively) from the 1990s until relatively recently, when the so-called “neoliberal order” has shown signs of cracking (Gerstle, 2022).

What is of normative interest to students of politics is not a potentially more autonomous individual subject's grant of legitimacy to a state. Rather, what is of normative interest is the difference between elite forbearance, when it is the product of prudential considerations beyond simply responding to majoritarian demands, and forbearance which also entails the acceptance of majority desires. Because there is no alternative to a world in which some dominate others (can kill or harm others or show forbearance toward those they could kill or harm), the methodological issue is not one of calibrating an abstract difference between autonomy and domination. Rather, given that society at any level will contain at least two types of actors, the powerful and the weak, analysis is an exercise in avoiding over-interpretation of the evidence that the relatively powerless have prompted forbearance (following Bull, 2019, 7). Order depends much more on the cooperation of and (formalized) competition among elites than it does on elite-majority competition or, we venture, even rarer elite-majority cooperation.

Normative theories which emphasize legitimacy take as given that equal rights lead to a certain balance of power, more precisely, of at-hand power resources between elites and majority, which we suggest is not necessarily present. Given the various types of power resources, it follows that even though bargaining and deliberation are the natural decision-making processes of politics now and around here, the seeking of collective ends in an ordered fashion need not be conducted against the backdrop of a state that makes sense to each subject. In vast concentrations, the most potent modern power resource, moveable wealth, trumps other types, such as people power (based on solidarity), or that derived from constitutions, such as sustain civil, political, social, or stakeholder rights. A theory of politics and so the state that justifies itself to each subject is one that presumes an isonomic relationship among all individuals that generally exists only among relatively equal elites. Even, that is, if it might be argued that during the heyday of social citizenship, the gap between those offered a legitimation and those toward whom forbearance was exercised was narrower.¹¹

Yet, even on the most optimistic analysis, such as that of Marshall's original narrative, the kinds of bargaining and deliberation central to the modern Western state, and the mass-affluence that the social “grand compromise” afforded to a significant cohort of individuals, were in fact dependent on the presence of organized people power sufficient to keep powerful minorities at the table. That is, to focus minority minds on the need to bring the majority along when deliberating over ends (to “win” the Cold War, for instance). That, now and around here, these conditions did sustain something like a radically advantageous situation for some citizens is important. All things being equal and the desire for deeper democracy taken as given, Williams’ emphasis on legitimacy seems to miss something though. Conditions that approach the BLD have been maintained but increasing numbers have been radically disadvantaged since. The basic ingredients of politics are powerful groups organized around shared interests and oriented to durable policy outcomes.

The contribution of our argument for (realist) political theorists interested in democracy is as follows: We show that including democracy in a Williamsian framework for theorizing politics leads to tensions with realist commitments to interpreting politics from a contextual grounding in political (not moral) norms. We further show an alternative path for theorizing the connection between the establishment of politics and democracy. This path deemphasizes or, rather, resituates the norm of legitimacy as part of rather than the “whole story” of this connection. This alternative path, we conjecture, helps to clarify the distinctive contribution that radical realism can make to thinking about democracy. In doing so, it sets radical realism in contrast with strands of realism that, as do ideal and nonideal justice theory, emphasize legitimacy and justification (a contrast also detected by Samuel Bagg (2022) and William Clare Roberts (2022)). If Williams does allege that legitimation is the universal objective of politics, then we counter that this objective must be situated in relation to the narrow objective of recognizing group status in an ordered hierarchy. The norm of legitimacy, too, should be interpreted as a concomitant of group or, more rarely, individual success in the context of long-term struggle over power and status (Geuss 2010, 42).