A revival of Confucianism in post-Mao China helped the government legitimate its power in the face of a new socio-political and economic situation. This paper specifically explores the role of Confucian self-cultivation in China’s governance. Drawing on Beetham’s theory of legitimation of power and Weber’s tri-typology of authority, we argue that self-cultivation, appealing to ingrained cultural values and traditions, fulfils the criteria of legitimation of power through two principles, namely, differentiation and community interest. In the context of suzhi education (...) and China’s national university entrance exam, we interrogate tensions and paradoxes between the need for a presentation of modern and liberal authority and the CCP’s one-party rule. The paper illustrates the complexity of China’s authoritarianism and the intricacies and intrinsic relevance of self-cultivation in current practice. (shrink)

First, something about the word. 'Bureau' (French, borrowed into German) is a desk, or by extension an office (as in 'I will be at the office tomorrow'; 'I work at the Bureau of Statistics'). 'Bureaucracy' is rule conducted from a desk or office, i.e. by the preparation and dispatch of written documents - or, these days, their electronic equivalent. In the office are kept records of communications sent and received, the files or archives, consulted in preparing new ones. This kind (...) of rule is of course not found in the ancient classifications of kinds of government: monarchy, aristocracy, democracy - and bureaucracy? In fact it does not belong in such a classification. It is a servant of government, a means by which a monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, or other form of government, rules. Those who invented the word wanted to suggest that the servant was trying to become the master. Weber is of course aware of this tendency; in fact he attacked the pretensions of the Prussian bureaucracy to be an objective and neutral servant of society, above politics, and emphasized that every bureaucracy has interests of its own, and connections with other social strata (especially among the upper classes); see Beetham, chapter 3. But formally and in theory the bureaucracy is merely a means, and this is largely true also in practice: someone must provide policy direction and back the bureaucrat up (if necessary) with force. 'At the top of a bureaucratic organization, there is necessarily an element which is at least not purely bureaucratic', SEO, p. 335, to give policy direction. (shrink)

One of the influential contributions to criminalisation theories is Duff’s work on public wrongs, which offers a thin master principle of criminalisation, proposing that we have a reason to criminalise a type of conduct if it constitutes a public wrong; one that violates a polity’s civil order and forms part of that polity’s proper business. The nature of the civil order, the scope of its proper business, and the distinction between the public and private realms of wrongs are context-relative to (...) each polity, structured by their legal, institutional, and informal values and ways of life. Such a context-relative view led to problematic criminalisation examples raised by Duff and his critics. This article engages more fully with the relativism of the civil order and public wrongs in non-democratic and illiberal contexts. It draws on examples such as Saudi Arabi and Iran, and Beetham’s work on the legitimation of power to argue that conceptualising the civil order as an undifferentiated whole that represents a polity’s chosen way of life overlooks the ways in which the civil order’s values and practices are shaped by relations of power and exclusion rules and processes. This, in turn, exposes the theory to the risk of mirroring and legitimising unequal relations of power and impeding efforts to change them. This is also due to the theory’s lack of proper normative guidance on the legitimacy of criminalisation. The potential commitment to – instead of a preference for – democracy and guarantees of equality and freedoms might help strengthen the theory normatively, but it is insufficient to guard against the raised problems. (shrink)

During the Covid-19 pandemic, considerable scholarly attention has been paid to the proliferation of conspiracy theories and their potential impacts. How and why digital media has facilitated the production, consumption, and distribution of such discourses as ‘truth’ remains largely neglected in the literature though. This paper explores this process through a transdisciplinary methodology designed to investigate legitimation in digital spaces. Based on a theoretical bridge between Beetham’s theory of legitimation and KhosraviNik’s principle that visibility-equals-legitimacy, the Multimodal Critical Affect-Discourse Analysis (...) of an audio-visual performance of the 5G conspiracy theory exposes how it has been simultaneously legitimized through authoritative performance and visibility. An interview given by the notorious conspiracy theorist David Icke, in which he associates the pandemic with 5G technology, was used as a case study because it was widely consumed and reproduced as ‘truth’, leading media companies to take unprecedented action against conspiracy theories. Besides contributing to existing debates on conspiracy theories, this paper offers new directions for the critical analysis of legitimation and power, acknowledging the fluid and diffuse nature of power in network societies and illuminating how meanings, beliefs, and affects have been manipulated by multiple actors to achieve consent and motivate collaborative authorship. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:SENOR HIRSCH AS SACRIFICIAL VICTIM AND THE MODERNISM OF CONRAD'S NOSTROMO Andrew Bartlett University ofBritish Columbia One of René Girard's more pithy definitions of mimetic desire reads: "The model designates the desirable while at the same time desiring it. Desire is always imitation ofanother desire, desire for the same object, and, therefore, an inexhaustible source of conflicts and rivalries" {Double Business Bound 39). The notation that desire is an (...) "inexhaustible" source of conflicts hints at the political pessimism expressed more openly elsewhere in Girard's writing. In 1961, he said it like this: "Whatever political or social system is somehow imposed on them, men will never achieve the peace and happiness of which the revolutionaries dream, nor the bleating harmony which so scares the reactionaries. They will always get on togetherjust enough to enable them never to agree" (Deceit 110-11). This is a Girard who, suspicious of political rhetoric, speaks with audacious cynicism even of democracy: "Who is there left to imitate after the tyrant? Henceforth men shall copy each other... Democracy is one vast middle-class court where the courtiers are everywhere and the king is nowhere" (Deceit 119). This Girard has remained consistent in his thematization of the impurity of all political compromises: "men are only capable ofreconciling their differences at the expense of a third party. The best men can hope for in their quest for nonviolence is the unanimity-minus-one ofthe surrogate victim" (Violence 259). Girard's political skepticism seems to be a result of his conviction that arbitrary victims ofviolent unanimity are the "ingredient" in political thought that allows each community to be flattered by the illusion of its political innocence, the illusion of the justifiability of its violence. 48Andrew Bartlett Modem political thought cannot dispense with morals, but it cannot become purely moral without ceasing to be political. Another ingredient must therefore be mixed with morals. If we really tried to identify what this is we would inevitably end up with formulas like Caiaphas': "It is better that this man or those die so that the community may survive" (Scapegoat 116). Political institutions, in establishing power relations between dominant and subordinate people, always exercise force, violence (Beetham 47-48). A perfectly moral politics seems as impossible as a perfectly nonviolent politics. Girard's refusal to plant his feet in the wet cement of any single political party's rhetoric is the outcome, in part, of his preference for a religious perspective on human affairs. The religious is his fundamental category ofanalysis; and religion in Girard's view is not an unenlightened form of belief to be superseded by political wisdom, but rather the fundamental mode of human social organization, the political only a secular displacement of it. I hasten to add that Girard's pessimism about political arrangements arises not from any stoical indifference to their victims, but rather from his respect for victims—a respect that is finally religious in character. A related sub-clause of Girard's political pessimism is the incompatibility ofmimetic theory and "identity politics," broadly defined so as to include nationalist or ethnic politics based on historical grievances and desires for vengeance. I have in mind here Girard's idea that the distinct identity of the surrogate victim is not strictly relevant to the effects of collective violence. Violence belongs to all men, and thus to none in particular. It is futile to look for the secret ofthe redemptive process in distinctions between the surrogate victim and other members of the community. The crucial fact is that the choice ofthe victim is arbitrary (Violence 257). The stabilizing effects of political scapegoating thus depend on the degree of unanimity in the community's violence, not on the identity ofthe victim. The identity of the sacrificial victim is not essential in scapegoating; the essential in scapegoating is the unanimity ofthe collective violence itself (cf. Violence 84, 150). Perhaps because of this priority of violent unanimity over victim identity, Girard has measured his distance from specific political causes (Scapegoat 19-20). We must confront what I would call the formal equivalence of scapegoats. The arbitrary victim of a sacrificial political process may be anyone: scandalously rich or scandalously... (shrink)

The thesis of the article is that processes of structural political change can be adequately understood only on the basis of a multi-dimensional concept of political legitimacy. It is argued that the most prominent account of the idea, namely Max Weber's typology of legitimate authority, is misleading because of both its incompleteness and its incoherence (II). Drawing on David Beetham, we instead propose to analytically differentiate between three universal, genetically linked dimensions of legitimacy: (1) a basically pragmatic one, (2) (...) a theoretically re flexive, and (3) a performatively expressive dimension (III). By means of this scheme it becomes possible to capture fundamental, regularly violent processes of legitimation, as well as historically different forms of legitimacy. Empirically, the usefulness of our proposal shall be shown by sketching, on the one hand, the formation of “early states”, and the emergence of modern revolutions on the other (IV). (shrink)