Imperfect Legitimacy

Abstract

In the last few years there have been a number of serious assaults on the political institutions of the United States. The very idea of the open society — as Karl Popper has made it famous — has been put in jeopardy. Among the assaults, there was, first, the wide receptivity to quasi-Marxist and neo-Marxist critiques of democratic government in an advanced capitalist society. Marxism had never died; but what was new in America was the readiness of large numbers of people to pay attention to those who espoused it in some form or other, and then perhaps to borrow a few elements from it or use it as a kind of general sanction for feeling that something was very wrong with America. There was, second, the willingness to look upon democratic law as something a good deal less than sacred: the politics of civil disobedience, non-compliance, active confrontation, exemplary violence against property, massive coercive non-violence, and other forms of illegal and irregular political activity was practiced. It may be that even more important than the practice of this politics was the large amount of first-rate writing that the practice called forth, writing aimed at the philosophical defense of the practice. Such writing was another intellectual tendency, besides Marxism, which worked in the direction of questioning the conventional understanding of the nature and status of the institutional life of the open society.

I wrote this paper on a sabbatical leave made possible by a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation for the academic year 1971–72. I wish to express my appreciation to the Foundation.