Zoltán Gábor Szucs (Eötvös Lorand University) Kommentar:  Dirk Schuck ( Universität Leipzig, CMB) Zur vorbereitenden Lektüre kann der Artikel “Legitimacy in Autocracies“ von Johannes Gerschewski gelesen werden, dessen Position Zoltán Gábor Szűcs in seinem Vortrag hinterfragen wird (Der Artikel ist als pdf auch im INTRANET im Order „Séminaire Central“ verfügbar).  “Legitimacy in illiberal regimes: does this notion make sense at all?” Zoltán Gábor Szűcs (Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest) There is an age-old debate about the legitimacy of non-democratic regimes: some have argued that non-democratic regimes cannot be meaningfully called legitimate in a normative sense (let alone those philosophical anarchists who claim that even democracies have no legitimacy) while others have contended that at least in a descriptive sense it is meaningful to speak about legitimacy in non-democratic regimes because looking for legitimation is among the basic instruments (besides repression and cooptation) of creating and maintaining political order in such regimes (recently, Johannes Gerschewski argued for this position in an article in Perspectives on Politics). The recently emerging “illiberal regimes” (authoritarian regimes with a democratic façade) lend some urgency to this old theoretical problem as their longer-term survival rests on the persuasiveness of their democratic machinery that even includes regularly held, competitive, multiparty elections and the absence of massive electoral fraud or widespread political oppression. Certainly no one really would want to be an apologist for these regimes, but it might seem hard to deny some kind of legitimacy from them at least in the descriptive sense since the survival of these regimes depend on actual and widespread popular support. On the other hand, however, the obvious intention of illiberal regimes to blur the boundaries between democratic and non-democratic regimes should remind us the importance of the normative aspect of the notion of legitimacy. Exactly because it is so tempting to apply the notion of legitimacy to illiberal regimes in the descriptive sense do we need to revisit the problem of legitimacy from a normative political theoretical angle and ask some tough questions about what it takes to accept a political regime as legitimate. To offer a solution to this problem I will argue that (1) however tempting it might seem, we cannot meaningfully speak about legitimacy in a purely descriptive sense; (2) the concept of legitimacy is simply unsuitable to address the normative aspects of living in some (democratic and non-democratic) political regimes; (3) there is a deeper (meta-theoretical) problem behind this conceptual issue, the so-called “is-ought problem”, that has played a particularly important part in modern political philosophy and that has caused so much trouble around the notion of legitimacy; (4) only if we offer an alternative answer to the “is-ought problem” can we properly address the normative aspects of living in non-democratic regimes in a way that makes justice to the normative content of living under such circumstances without leading to a clearly unacceptable apology of these regimes.   Wir freuen uns auf Euer zahlreiches Erscheinen im virtuellen Raum. VIA ZOOM