Legitimacy

Author(s):  
David Beetham

Legitimacy refers to the rightfulness of a powerholder or system of rule. The term originated in controversies over property and succession, and was used to differentiate children born of a lawful marriage from those who were ‘illegitimate’. From thence the term entered political discourse via controversies over the rightful succession to the restored French throne after the Napoleonic period. However, questions about what makes government rightful have been a central issue of philosophical debate since the ancient Greeks, and in this sense the concept, if not the term, ‘legitimacy’ is as old as political philosophy itself. Its significance lies in the moral, as opposed to merely prudential, grounds for obedience which follow for subjects where power is rightfully acquired and exercised, and in the depth of allegiance which such political authorities can call upon in times of difficulty. What, then, makes government legitimate? Most thinkers agree that a necessary condition is that power should be acquired and exercised according to established rules, whether these are conventionally or legally defined. However, legal validity cannot be a sufficient condition of legitimacy, since both the rules and the power exercised under them also have to be morally justifiable. Two broad criteria for moral justifiability can be distinguished: (1) political power should derive from a rightful source of authority; (2) it should satisfy the rightful ends or purposes of government. Most philosophical disputes about legitimacy take place either within or between these two broad positions; any adequate account of it must embrace both however.

Author(s):  
Martin Odei Ajei

This chapter discusses the contributions of Kwame Nkrumah, Kwasi Wiredu, William. E. Abraham, and Kwame Gyekye to the corpus of African philosophy. It elaborates their normative perspectives on three themes: the relevance of tradition to modernity, the appropriate form of democracy as means of legitimating political power in Africa, and the relative status of person and community; it also reflects on the significance of these themes in postcolonial African social and political philosophical discourse. The chapter then points out points of convergence and divergence among these individuals and how they relate with Western philosophical perspectives and argues that their work configures a coherent discourse that justifies joining them in a tradition of Ghanaian political philosophy.


2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (7) ◽  
pp. 624-638
Author(s):  
J. de Vicente

We study the separability of bipartite quantum systems in arbitrary dimensions using the Bloch representation of their density matrix. This approach enables us to find an alternative characterization of the separability problem, from which we derive a necessary condition and sufficient conditions for separability. For a certain class of states the necessary condition and a sufficient condition turn out to be equivalent, therefore yielding a necessary and sufficient condition. The proofs of the sufficient conditions are constructive, thus providing decompositions in pure product states for the states that satisfy them. We provide examples that show the ability of these conditions to detect entanglement. In particular, the necessary condition is proved to be strong enough to detect bound entangled states.


Author(s):  
Eswaran Sridharan

This chapter analyses India’s prospects as a rising power by asking what kind of power India has the potential to be, given its military, economic, and institutional capacities and the economic and geostrategic constraints it faces. It argues that while sustained high growth is a necessary condition it is not a sufficient condition since economic growth does not necessarily convert smoothly into greater power. Due to such conversion problems India, like some other powers, might not be able to exercise commensurate regional, extra-regional, and global influence as might appear to follow from the revival of sustained high growth and increased economic weight. The more achievable and likely alternative is that of a coalitional or bridging power that can play the role of an effective partner in the security and other spheres to a range of powers, principally to the United States and in the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean regions.


2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 227
Author(s):  
Mohammad Imam Utoyo ◽  
Basuki Widodo ◽  
Toto Nusantara ◽  
Suhariningsih Suhariningsih

This script was aimed to determine the necessary conditions for boundedness of Riesz potential in the classical Morrey space. If these results are combined with previous research results will be obtained the necessary and sufficient condition for boundedness of Riesz potential. This necessary condition is obtained through the use of characteristic function as one member of the classical Morrey space.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 56
Author(s):  
John McGuire

In this paper, I reconstruct the notion of kratos as a unique and distinguishable exercise of political power. Using examples from 5th- and 4th-century Attic tragedy, Old Comedy, and forensic oratory, I show how kratos was used in Athenian cultural and political discourse to convey the irrefutability of a claim, the recognition of someone’s prevailing over another, and the sense of having the last word—all of which makes kratic power dependent upon its own continued demonstrability. I argue that the peculiarly performative character of kratos has little or no role within contemporary democratic thinking because the agency of the dēmos is largely mediated through the mechanisms of electoral success and constitutional rights. Nevertheless—and regardless of whether they are ultimately successful in achieving their stated political aims—the spontaneous, organisationally diffuse protests operating extra-institutionally under the banners of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter reveal how the attempted ‘domestication’ of kratos, and the sublimation of its peculiar power into piecemeal reform, was never a realistic or satisfactory answer for democratic discontent.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Díaz ◽  
Elena R. Álvarez-Buylla

AbstractThe qualitative model presented in this work recovers the onset of the four fields that correspond to those of each floral organ whorl of Arabidopsis flower, suggesting a mechanism for the generation of the positional information required for the differential expression of the A, B and C identity genes according to the ABC model for organ determination during early stages of flower development. Our model integrates a previous model for the emergence of WUS pattern in the apical meristem, and shows that this pre-pattern is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the posterior information of the four fields predicted by the ABC model. Furthermore, our model predicts that LFY diffusion along the L1 layer of cells is not a necessary condition for the patterning of the floral meristem.


Author(s):  
Yanyan Wang

In this paper, we consider the generalized approximate boundary synchronization for a coupled system of wave equations with Dirichlet boundary controls. We analyse the relationship between the generalized approximate boundary synchronization and the generalized exact boundary synchronization, give a sufficient condition to realize the generalized approximate boundary synchronization and a necessary condition in terms of Kalman’s matrix, and show the meaning of the number of total controls. Besides, by the generalized synchronization decomposition, we define the generalized approximately synchronizable state, and obtain its properties and a sufficient condition for it to be independent of applied boundary controls.


2003 ◽  
pp. 61-85
Author(s):  
Simo Elakovic

The crisis of modernity as the crisis of the political is seen by the author primarily as a crisis of the "measure" of the criterion of political decision making and action. This crisis is understood in the first place as a crisis of self-awareness and practice of the ethos. Machiavelli was the first to attempt a solution to this problem by introducing the concept of virtus, which became the fundamental principle of modern political philosophy. However, many modern and contemporary interpreters of Machiavelli's thought often ignore the social and political context in which the political doctrine of the Florentine thinker arose. Namely, Machiavelli's effort to find an authentic form of the political act that would make possible a harmonization and stabilization of the dramatic political circumstances then prevailing in Italian cities required a reliable diagnosis and adequate means for a successful therapy of the sick organism of the community. The epochal novelty in Machiavelli's political theory was the shift from the ancient theorization of virtue to its modern operationalization. Nevertheless, this shift is often interpreted as a radical opposing of the Greek concept of arete to the Roman virtus, which is crudely and simplistically reduced to bravery and strength necessary for taking and keeping political power. Hegel in his political philosophy travels an important part of the road - unconsciously rather than consciously - along with Machiavelli and Shelling. This particularly holds for his understanding of the necessity of strength and bravery in the process of operationalizing the spirit of freedom in history through the mediation of "negation" as "the power of evil". The mediation of subjectivity and substantiality, according to Hegel, takes place in the state by the brutal bridling of the world spirit where not just individuals but whole peoples are sacrificed - toward freedom, i.e. its realization in the community of the ethos. The "trouble of the times" is a consequence of the separation between I and the world (Entzeiung) and stems from a reduced political reason which lacks the criterion of the ethical totality for political action and decision making. By the separation of the ethos this reason get routinized and political action is reduced to naked technique of winning and keeping political power. In the concluding segment of the paper the author points to some global consequences of the crisis of political decision making in the historical reality at the end of 20th century.


2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (06) ◽  
pp. 1250052 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALI AKHAVI ◽  
INES KLIMANN ◽  
SYLVAIN LOMBARDY ◽  
JEAN MAIRESSE ◽  
MATTHIEU PICANTIN

This paper addresses a decision problem highlighted by Grigorchuk, Nekrashevich, and Sushchanskiĭ, namely the finiteness problem for automaton (semi)groups. For semigroups, we give an effective sufficient but not necessary condition for finiteness and, for groups, an effective necessary but not sufficient condition. The efficiency of the new criteria is demonstrated by testing all Mealy automata with small stateset and alphabet. Finally, for groups, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition that does not directly lead to a decision procedure.


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