empirical usage, especially inpolitical sociology. Here the concentration is
principally on how any given political system comes to be seen as ‘legitimate’
by a majority of its citizens. Why do most citizens of the USA and the People’s
Republic of China see their government as entitled to require their obedience
when, presumably, people are much the same in both countries but the policies
and structures of the state are very different? This is the question addressed by
those who study legitimacy as an empirical fact rather than a philosophical
problem. As well as being a major question in such research, the bases of
legitimacy, a categorization of systemical grounds for obedience that actually
work, can provide most useful rules for grouping different sorts of political
systems. Many of the classifications of political systems found in the modern
study ofcomparative governmentrely on typologies based on the various
grounds of political legitimacy. (These, incidentally, nearly all derive in one
way or another from the pioneering work of MaxWeber.) Thus democracies
tend to argue for their legitimacy in terms of giving voters what they
immediately want, while other political systems may offer general principles
to support their right to command. Socialist states may focus on the ultimate
benefit to workers, right-wingjuntason some sense of traditional national
identity. In recent social science considerable attention has been paid to a so
called ‘crisis of legitimacy’, by which is meant the increasing difficulty Western
states have in justifying themselves, because their only appeal is to utilitarian
socio-economic rewards which they are incapable of sustaining.
Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924, originally named Ulyanov) was, like his
younger revolutionary colleagueTrotsky, a revolutionary before he was a
Marxist, both chronologically and intellectually. Probably his lifelong passion
for revolution, and his total dedication to politics and nothing else, stemmed
from the execution of his brother for complicity in the assassination of Tsar
Alexander III in 1886. In 1894 Lenin was imprisoned, and then exiled to
Siberia until 1900. The following year he left Russia for Europe, and was to
spend the years until 1917, except for a period from 1905–08, there, helping to
organize, and then take over, the rather heterogeneous collection of e ́migre ́
Russian left-wing movements that made up the All-Russian Social Demo-
cratic Labour Party (RSDLP). He rejected the view of many that Russia was
too underdeveloped economically to undergo a full Marxist revolution that
would lead to socialism, and finally managed to win a majority, theBolshevik
wing, of the RSDLP to his side, to form the Bolshevik party; those opposed to
Lenin’s radical approach became known as theMensheviks. Lenin, though
accepting much of Marx’s philosophy, added two vital ingredients to make up
Lenin