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Believing and Getting Others to Believe: The Subjective Motives of Legitimacy

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The Political Anatomy of Domination

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Abstract

The processes of compliance do not have much to say about what people actually think or what they feel in their heart of hearts about the ins and outs of their interests, projects or types of behavior. Moreover, the issue of normality and compliance is primarily a question of representation. This chapter analyzes the circularity between persuasion and legitimacy, between rhetoric and legitimacy. It is in fact through discourses and narratives, these ways of shaping things in linguistic forms that clientele networks work, rules are negotiated and power relations between groups and individuals played out: one must learn to behave in a certain way, know how to say things as they need to be said and when they need to be said, according to certain criteria, certain norms and certain forms, while also knowing how to play with the rules. It is not the arguments as such or the content of these ideologies that matters, but the discursive and persuasive characters of these, that make it possible to serve interests, to influence groups or individuals, and to create networks of clientele and dependence on through which domination can occur.

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  1. CERI-SciencesPo, Paris, France

    Béatrice Hibou

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Hibou, B. (2017). Believing and Getting Others to Believe: The Subjective Motives of Legitimacy. In: The Political Anatomy of Domination. The Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49391-6_2

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