Secularization left a legitimation gap that only democratic procedure could fill

Evidence

The secularization of state power gave rise to a gap in legitimation. Because the belief that the ruling dynasties were divinely ordained no longer sufficed to legitimize them in modern societies, the democratic system had to legitimize itself out of its own resources, as it were, through the legitimacy-generating power of the legally institutionalized procedure of democratic will formation. Religious conceptions of legitimacy were not replaced by a different idea, but instead by the procedure of democratic self-empowerment, which is institutionalized in the form of equally distributed subjective rights, so that it can be exercised by free and equal citizens. At first glance, it seems quite mysterious how the legal institutionalization of a procedure of democratic will formation – in other words, sheer ‘legality’ – could nevertheless give rise to the ‘legitimacy’ of universally convincing results. — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 16

Categorization

• XREF: Directly continues the Weberian disenchantment-plus-legitimation line in the 1962 book and connects to deliberative-democracy debates (Rawls, Cohen, Dryzek). — connects to: Failed secular ideologies leave religion to fill the political vacuum; Power-legitimation must come from within democracy itself once unifying worldviews fade — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 92; Secularization stripped religion of its state-legitimating function in the US and Japan — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 90
• DEFINE: Clarifies the precise sense in which ‘legality’ generates ‘legitimacy’ — the central procedural insight Habermas carries from earlier work.

Related

• Power-legitimation must come from within democracy itself once unifying worldviews fade (similarity 0.85)
• Democratic legitimacy requires tacit constitutional consensus renewed each generation (similarity 0.81)
• Secularization stripped religion of its state-legitimating function in the US and Japan (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Power-legitimation must come from within democracy itself once unifying worldviews fade #corroborates (0.95) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 92
• Failed secular ideologies leave religion to fill the political vacuum #complicates (0.70)