Abstract
When we enquire into political legitimacy, we are, broadly speaking, exploring the question of whether a particular ruler or regime rules rightfully. We are interested in whether the rule is characterised by right or is merely a form of rule via coercion, a distinction that is usually put in terms of de jure and de facto order. While this question is basic to political experience, there nevertheless might be different ways in which it can be formulated which in turn will influence what is going to count as an adequate answer. In this chapter I want to express some concerns as to the way in which much contemporary modus vivendi theories have either raised the question of political legitimacy or the sort of answer that it takes to be sufficient. That is to say, it has either tended to get the question wrong or the answer, or both. In the end, I want to suggest that modus vivendi can only represent a coherent and distinct political theory if it takes its Hobbesian heritage seriously and accept that the provision of order is both a necessary and a sufficient condition of legitimacy. Whether that is an attractive way of thinking about politics is a different question.
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Notes
- 1.
While moral consensus need not be dismissed as an impossibility in human affairs, the concern is both that it will be necessarily fleeting and, maybe more problematically for moralistic theories, itself the result of the political power that it is supposed to help justify. See Stears (2007).
- 2.
The connections between contemporary modus vivendi and Hobbes are made most explicit in the work of John Gray (2000).
- 3.
In a more recent article, Wendt (2016) has abandoned his commitment to the thought that a modus vivendi arrangement is one which necessarily comes into being via compromise, at least in part for the sort of reasons that follow here.
- 4.
A particularly Whiggish history of the development of England’s political institutions tells us that King John’s concessions to the nobles in 1215 in the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights accepted by King William III following the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 show that the fundamentals of the English constitution are the result of a compromise. This is false. In both cases, not only did the monarch at the time have to be strongly influenced by other powers within society to both accept those terms and keep them (which John did not do), but, more importantly for our purposes, these were agreements between the monarch and the nobles or the monarch and parliament. These were not agreements in which the vast majority of people had any say, even if they might have benefited from them.
- 5.
One way around this is to ask what compromise agents would make in ideal circumstances—of equal power, favourable conditions, and identical interests—but it is not clear why we would talk specifically of compromise in these circumstances. For surely we want to reach compromises only in those conditions where power is not equally distributed, where conditions are not favourable (e.g. that resources are not infinite) and where people’s interests and ends conflict. So how could we hypothetically fix the nature of these non-ideal circumstances in which compromises are sought? In the end the question only makes sense if we ask whether x can plausibly represent a compromise struck by agents y in conditions z, where z is an actual formation of individual and social forces. But then modus vivendi becomes vulnerable again to the previous charge that even the most unjust compromises could plausibly be reached if conditions z are so unfavourable.
- 6.
Of course, we might insist that one virtue of greater popular participation in the decision-making process is precisely that it enables people to engage in compromise. But that then raises the question as to the value of compromise which I do not think modus vivendi can suitably answer on its own terms. I thank Manon Westphal for pushing me on this point.
- 7.
I do not intend this suggestion to rule out all forms of social critique, only those who get their normative critical force from the sheer fact that our social world falls short of our personal ideals. Such positions beg the question why we should think that the social world ought to conform to our personal ideals in the first place. I thank David McCabe for pointing out the need to clarify this.
- 8.
While the majority of self-professed realists today probably take their lead from Bernard Williams in giving such significance to legitimacy, Raymond Geuss (2008), another prominent realist, is highly sceptical that legitimacy gives any theoretical vantage point from which to begin understanding politics. So there are variants of realism (as there are variants of any -ism). The question is what, if anything, makes modus vivendi a distinct variant?
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Sleat, M. (2019). Modus Vivendi and Legitimacy: Some Sceptical Thoughts. In: Horton, J., Westphal, M., Willems, U. (eds) The Political Theory of Modus Vivendi. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79078-7_11
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