... unable to function. The state requires legitimacy to achieve the goals that depend on the support of its population, and to maintain its political system intact in the face of serious policy failure or challenge to it. Weber has argued that, as legitimacy is derived from popular support, the determination of whether or not a state is legitimate is simply whether or not people believe it to be legitimate. Thus, to judge a state as legitimate is merely to find that its citizens believe it to be legitimate. In this vein, Lipset expresses legitimacy as the "capacity of the system to engender and maintain the belief that the existing political institutions are the most appropriate ones for the society" (88). However, this explanation has been subsequently dismissed by many other social scientists, who argue that it empties the concept of legitimacy of any objective reference or moral content, boiling it ...

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