“Legitimation as a process is best described as a 'second-order' objectivation of meaning. Legitimation produces new meanings that serve to integrate the meanings already attached to disparate institutional processes. The function of legitimation is to make objectively available and subjectively plausible the 'first-order' objectivations that have been institutionalized.”

— Peter L. Berger, book The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 92 (1991; 110)

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Peter L. Berger45

Austrian-born American sociologist 1929–2017

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Information Systems (1973), p. 330; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

“On this level of legitimation, the reflective integration of discrete institutional processes reaches its ultimate fulfilment. A whole world is created. All the lesser legitimating theories are viewed as special perspectives on phenomena that are aspects of this world. Institutional roles become modes of participation in a universe that transcends and includes the institutional order. In our previous example, the 'science of cousinhood' is only a part of a much wider body of theory, which, almost certainly, will contain a general theory of the cosmos and a general theory of man.”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

1991, 114
The Social Construction of Reality, 1966

“The two party electoral system performs the essential function of helping to legitimate the existing social order.”

Michael Parenti (1933) American academic

Source: Democracy for the Few (2010 [1974]), sixth edition, Chapter 11, p. 179

“Legitimation is the process by which a legislator is authorized to promulgate such a law as a norm.”

Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) French philosopher

Source: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977), p.8

“A distribution is just if it arises from another just distribution by legitimate means.”

Robert Nozick (1938–2002) American political philosopher

Source: (1974), Ch. 7 : Distributive Justice, Section I, The Entitlement Theory, p. 151

“The doctrine of laissez-faire in the mid-nineteenth century essentially allowed three functions for the government: first, maintaining the external defense of the country; second, providing for the internal order and security of persons; and third, possibly, providing for minimal public amenities. … Criminalization and punishment became, undisputedly, the most legitimate and competent task of the government. There, for sure, government intervention was proper, necessary, legitimate, and competent. There, natural orderliness had to be replaced by governmental ordering.”

Bernard Harcourt (1963) American academic

Source: The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (2011), p. 37

“In the end, the two failed Chilean constituent processes were a marketing exercise to legitimize the constitution of the Dictatorship.”

José Baroja (1983) Chilean author and editor

Source: Interview.

“There Are No Unachievable Goals
There Are No Unsaveable Souls
No Legitimate Kings Or Queens,
Do You Know What I Mean?”

Ozzy Osbourne (1948) English heavy metal vocalist and songwriter

I Just Want You.
Song lyrics, Ozzmosis (1995)

“A new level of organization means a simplification of system function, and of the corresponding system structure, it also means the initiation of a process of progressive structural and functional complexification.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Evolution: the general theory (1996), p. 28.

“The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

To the Republican Citizens of Washington County, Maryland (31 March 1809)
1800s, Post-Presidency (1809)

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