Questions surrounding the concept of legitimacy--the force that keeps a polity together, and whose absence causes it to shatter--are possibly the most important concern of a study of politics. M. F. N. Giglioli examines the shift to a distinctly modern understanding of the concept in Continental Europe, following the crisis of liberal rationalism in the late nineteenth century, and the search for new ways of envisaging the determinants of collective action into the twentieth century.

The author examines certain aspects of the intellectual and political background of early...