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Rodney Barker, Legitimating Identities: The Self-Presentations of Rulers and Subjects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 161 pp.
It is over a decade since Rodney Barker, along with a few other authors, helped revive debates over political legitimacy, its proper conceptualization, and its role in political life.(1) Legitimacy is a central concept in political discourse, and there are perhaps too many ways to speak of it. Yet the corollary (some would say cause) of legitimacy, legitimation, has virtually escaped direct analysis. What is legitimation? What happens where we find this term? The fact that Legitimating Identities tackles such rare questions directly should be of interest to virtually all social and political thinkers. The book offers a thought provoking and genuinely enjoyable, if not entirely satisfactory approach to a theory of legitimation. Without a doubt its ideas warrant further examination.
Barker introduces his thesis by enjoining us to recognize that the practice of politics is replete with non-utilitarian behaviours -- symbolic rituals, ostentatious building projects, elite parties, "pomp and ceremony," of which he offers no shortage of historical examples -- that are difficult to account for from a rationalist perspective. Moreover, much of this expenditure is evidently not for general consumption, but for a select audience of elites, and often mainly for rulers themselves. Barker refers to these characteristic activities of government as instances of "endogenous or self-legitimation." "What are governments doing," he asks, "when they spend time, resources and energy legitimating themselves?" (2). The broad answer is simple enough: "When rulers legitimate themselves, they claim that particular species of prestige which attaches to government" (4). The remainder of the book describes and explains how this claiming -- which Barker sees as "a dimension of politics" -- occurs.
The central point of Barker's argument is that this complex of claims is constitutive of the ruler's identity as a special person, and that rulers themselves are thus the primary target of their own claims. Legitimation, that is, is...