Truth Claims and Value-Freedom in the Treatment of Legitimacy
The Case of Weber
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11449129 |
|---|---|
| Authors | David Campbell (0000-0003-0525-8150, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1986 |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 207 |
| Publication date | 1986-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Law and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0263-323X • E-ISSN: 1467-6478 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1410281 |
| OpenAlex | W2315488080 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 7 |
Actors who believe that a social order is legitimate analytically hold that the claim to legitimacy of the order is true. It is frequently argued that a distanced theoretical commentary on an order's stability must adopt one of two distinct lines when addressing such beliefs. One would be simply to take note of these beliefs and discuss the legitimacy they recognise divorced from its truth claim. Legitimacy would thus be represented just as a psychological phenomenon whose relationship to truth is ignored for the purposes of empirical study. The other approach would be to assess the truthfulness of the claim to legitimacy and either endorse the beliefs, and with them the order's stability, or not. The first of these lines is taken to be the interest of empirical science seeking to explain the order's stability; the second is the separate interest of ethics seeking to pass practical judgment on that stability. In this paper I shall argue that the separation of these two interests is fundamentally insupportable. Whilst I could direct my criticism to either the science or the ethics which follows from this separation, I will concentrate upon the former here. I will contend that the value-free empirical study of legitimacy is impossible, and that scientific commentaries which purport to have carried it out merely conceal the value-judgments they necessarily contain. I do not say this in order to claim that empirical social study is impossible. Rather it is to argue that, properly conceived, the interest of empirical social science is one which is intrinsically committed to practical intervention. Suppression of this not only limits the practical value of science but actually leads to empirical incoherence. I will argue this through a consideration of Weber's pursuit of a value-free treatment of legitimacy. I shall use this device because, as we will see, his treatment raises the fundamental issues posed by any such attempt, and does
Epistemology · Law and economics · Legitimacy · Political science · Sociology · Statistics · Value (mathematics · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Evolving Legal Systems and Governance · Judicial and Constitutional Studies · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,11 |
| Citation span | 1991 - 2017 (27) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |