The ‘Crisis of Capitalism’ and the State – More Powerful, Less Responsible, Invariably Legitimate

This chapter traces the reconfiguration of the legitimacy relationship between states and citizens, and the related alteration of the semantics of the social contract since the advent of liberal democracies in Europe. This reconfiguration has fostered the recent emergence of a fourth modality of capitalism (as an institutionalized social order) after (1) the entrepreneurial nineteenth-century capitalism, (2) the ‘organized’ capitalism of the post-WWII welfare state, and (3) the neoliberal, ‘disorganized’ capitalism of the late twentieth century. A key feature of the new modality, in terms of the nature of power relations, is a simultaneous increase in the state’s administrative power and a decrease in its authority. However, due to a recasting of the legitimacy relationship between public authority and citizens, the deficient authority of states has not triggered a legitimacy crisis of the socio-economic system. A readjustment of the pathological relationship (from the point of view of democratic legitimacy) between public authority and citizens would require a stronger responsibilization of public authority in matters of social and economic policy.