Yuri Chekalin
The comparative analysis developed in this article has examined two of the most influential revolutions in modern history through a common historical question: how is political legitimacy reconstructed after the collapse of an established political order?
Comparative Interpretation: Canetti and the Historical Study of Revolutionary Legitimacy
Rather than seeking identical patterns or universal laws, the comparison has highlighted recurring historical problems confronted by revolutionary governments despite their profoundly different social, ideological, and institutional contexts.
Several conclusions emerge from this investigation.
First, revolutionary legitimacy begins with the erosion of confidence in existing institutions rather than with the immediate triumph of a new political doctrine. In both France and Russia, revolutionary governments inherited societies in which established authority had lost much of its capacity to command obedience. The revolutionary problem, therefore, was not simply the seizure of power but the construction of a new foundation upon which political authority could rest.
Second, the reconstruction of legitimacy required far more than constitutional change. Revolutionary governments developed new political vocabularies, created new public rituals, transformed commemorative practices, and reshaped symbolic landscapes through monuments, ceremonies, festivals, and public space. These symbolic innovations did not replace institutions, but they helped citizens interpret the meaning of political transformation and locate themselves within the emerging political community.
Third, revolutionary legitimacy depended upon active political participation. Crowds, public meetings, demonstrations, civic festivals, representative assemblies, and revolutionary organizations enabled ordinary people to experience political change directly. Such participation strengthened the visibility of the new political order while reinforcing the perception that sovereignty had acquired a different social foundation than under the previous regime.
Finally, revolutionary governments discovered that symbolic legitimacy alone could not sustain political authority indefinitely.
Durable governance required institutions capable of administering society after the revolutionary crisis had subsided.
Constitutions, legal systems, representative bodies, administrative organizations, and public institutions became essential components of political legitimacy because they translated revolutionary aspirations into the ordinary routines of government.
Taken together, these findings suggest that political legitimacy is best understood as the product of continuous interaction between symbolic meaning and institutional practice. Neither dimension alone adequately explains how revolutionary governments establish authority or why some political orders achieve greater durability than others. Symbols without institutions remain fragile; institutions without symbolic legitimacy struggle to command public recognition. Historical experience demonstrates that stable political authority emerges from their reciprocal development rather than from the predominance of either element.
Within this broader framework, Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power occupies an important but carefully defined place. Canetti offers one of the twentieth century’s most penetrating analyses of the emotional, symbolic, and experiential dimensions of collective political life. His reflections on crowds, ritual, command, fear, and the psychology of power illuminate aspects of revolutionary politics that institutional histories sometimes leave unexplored. By directing attention to the lived experience of political participation, he reminds historians that legitimacy is not merely a constitutional principle but also a social and cultural experience.
The comparative evidence examined in this chapter nevertheless indicates that Canetti’s framework is most persuasive when integrated with broader historical analysis rather than treated as a comprehensive explanation of political development. Revolutions unfold within complex institutional, economic, legal, military, and international environments that extend beyond the symbolic relationships emphasized in Crowds and Power.
Historical comparison therefore does not diminish Canetti’s contribution; it situates his insights within a wider interpretive framework capable of accounting for both revolutionary mobilization and the subsequent consolidation of political authority.
This conclusion has implications extending beyond the French and Russian Revolutions. Comparative history suggests that political legitimacy should not be conceived as either purely institutional or purely symbolic. Governments derive authority through the continual interaction of law, administration, political participation, historical memory, public ritual, constitutional development, and shared systems of meaning.
The relative importance of these elements varies across societies and historical periods, but none can be understood adequately in isolation.
The dialogue between Canetti and comparative history therefore leads not to the confirmation or rejection of a single theory but to a more comprehensive understanding of political authority itself. Crowds and Power remains an indispensable contribution to the study of symbolic politics, while historical comparison demonstrates that symbols acquire enduring political significance only when they become embedded within institutions capable of sustaining public life across generations.
The following article develops this argument further by examining how revolutionary legitimacy evolves into stable systems of government. If this article has focused on the reconstruction of political authority during moments of revolutionary transformation, the next considers the equally important question of how that authority is institutionalized, maintained, and adapted over time.
Beyond Revolution: The Institutionalization of Political Legitimacy
Introduction
Revolutions are exceptional moments in history. They disrupt established institutions, transform political language, and redefine the relationship between governments and society. Yet however dramatic their beginnings, revolutions occupy only a brief period within the longer history of political communities. Once the revolutionary crisis has subsided, governments confront a fundamentally different challenge: they must transform extraordinary legitimacy into ordinary political authority.
This transition constitutes one of the central problems of political history. Revolutionary enthusiasm inevitably diminishes. The generation that experienced the founding events gradually passes from the political stage. New citizens are born into institutions they did not help create and inherit political systems whose origins belong to the past rather than to lived experience. Governments must therefore discover new sources of legitimacy capable of sustaining political authority beyond the revolutionary generation.
This article examines the historical processes through which political legitimacy becomes institutionalized.
Rather than focusing exclusively on revolutionary regimes, it explores a broader historical question applicable to monarchies, republics, democracies, socialist states, and constitutional governments alike. How do political communities preserve legitimacy once the exceptional circumstances of their foundation have disappeared? The answer, it will be argued, lies not in any single institution or political doctrine but in the interaction of constitutional development, administrative continuity, public memory, civic education, political participation, and symbolic practices that connect successive generations with the state.
The argument developed here builds directly upon the comparative analysis of the French and Russian Revolutions presented in the previous chapter. There we observed that revolutionary governments reconstructed legitimacy through new political language, public rituals, collective participation, and institutional innovation. The present chapter extends that analysis by asking how such legitimacy becomes durable. It argues that enduring political authority depends not upon the permanent preservation of revolutionary enthusiasm but upon the gradual normalization of political life through institutions that citizens come to regard as legitimate, predictable, and worthy of continued allegiance.
The Historical Problem
Every political order eventually encounters the same historical challenge.
Founding events—whether revolutions, constitutional settlements, national unifications, or successful struggles for independence—cannot remain permanently present within public consciousness. Historical memory changes as generations succeed one another. Governments must therefore cultivate legitimacy among citizens who possess no direct personal connection to the political events from which the existing state originally emerged.
This process represents more than institutional continuity. It involves the continual reconstruction of political legitimacy through law, education, constitutional practice, public administration, civic rituals, historical memory, and political participation. Stable governments are therefore sustained not by revolutionary emotion alone but by the ordinary experiences through which citizens encounter political authority in everyday life.
The following sections examine the principal historical mechanisms through which this transformation occurs, emphasizing that institutionalization does not eliminate the symbolic dimensions of political legitimacy. Rather, it integrates them into the continuing life of political communities.
Alexander Rimov
