Legitimacy is about structures controlling code contingency, not justification or acceptance.

Evidence

On the basis of the foregoing discussion on legitimacy, I differ from much current opinion in seeing the problem of legitimacy neither as one of establishing a sufficient (even a logically valid) justification for the power-code, nor actually accepting it solely on the basis of a mixture of consensus and force. I see it rather as a problem of the structures and processes which make the code possible and control it as it becomes contingent. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 697

Categorization

• DEFINE: Operationalizes legitimacy against the standard justification/acceptance account — a key term for the reader’s Luhmann-to-Giddens build.
• XREF: Directly connects to Luhmann’s system-trust thesis: legitimacy as contingency control parallels trust as complexity reduction — both are mechanisms for absorbing contingency.