The people’s consensus and scientific consensus are the same legitimation model

Evidence

This way of inquiring into sociopolitical legitimacy combines with the new scientific attitude: the name of the hero is the people, the sign of legitimacy is the people’s consensus, and their mode of creating norms is deliberation. The notion of progress is a necessary outgrowth of this. It represents nothing other than the movement by which knowledge is presumed to accumulate—but this movement is extended to the new sociopolitical subject. The people debate among themselves about what is just or unjust in the same way that the scientific community debates about what is true or false; they accumulate civil laws just as scientists accumulate scientific laws; they perfect their rules of consensus just as the scientists produce new “paradigms” to revise their rules in light of what they have learned. — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 251

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows how Lyotard fuses political and epistemic legitimation into a single paradigm — central to the modern metanarrative.
• XREF: connects to: Scientific legitimation rests on consensus among experts about language rules — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 324; Consensus is shaped and structured by unequal power rather than freely formed — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 919; Science’s trustworthiness rests on being intersubjective and collective — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice: How to Communicate…, 748 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Scientific legitimation rests on consensus among experts about language rules #corroborates (0.90) — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 324
• Modern science grounds truth rules in expert consensus, not transcendental authority #corroborates (0.90) — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 248
• Consensus is shaped and structured by unequal power rather than freely formed #qualifies (0.85) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 919
• Customary knowledge is legitimated by communal consensus the Greeks called opinion #expands (0.85) — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 187
• Science must produce a legitimating philosophical discourse about its own rules #expands (0.85) — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 87
• Science’s trustworthiness rests on being intersubjective and collective #corroborates (0.80) — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 748
• Humanity’s viewpoint and society’s viewpoint remain in principle distinct #qualifies (0.80) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 215
• Elites legitimate their power by invoking a consensus they themselves pre-structure #complicates (0.80) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 875