Dilemmas of political legitimacy

The concept of political legitimacy implies a debate about democracy and politics or, better still, about the possibility of democracy recovering control over the direction of politics after a period in which authoritarian régimes, which did not lack a certain technocratic flavour, discredited democracy to the point of rendering it ridiculous. This means accepting, of course, that the concept of political legitimacy contains an affirmation of principle, one moreover fundamental to any genuinely democratic thinking, which is the primacy of the logic of history over the logic of expediency.