Plan focus is not neutral, but a particular ethos that legitimates capitalism. Choosing to bracket their assumptions out from debate is a unique link.

When I discuss altering public attitudes to democratic capitalism in subsequent chapters, I will use “ethos” to speak of the ensemble of worldviews, including perceptions of interest, that orient behavior and endow it with social meaning. Ethos cannot be equated with ideology, rational interest, and ethical norms. In my usage, it connotes the cognitive and normative orientations regarding views about truth, appropriateness, and acceptability— a societal “common sense” or rationality. Within the ethos of modern democratic societies, for a person to claim decisional power for political or economic office on grounds that he or she is fated for such an office would be nonsensical. Similarly, claiming that a human being can be deprived of life without any justification would not only be considered inappropriate and unacceptable in most of these societies—it would be absurd. Therefore, such an idea would not even enter public debates: it stands beyond the common sense of our societies, beyond their ethos. Rational justification is the fulcrum of any modern ethos, present as much in modern democracies as in modern dictatorships. (Note that the latter would either hide the killing or offer some rational justification.) It is under the normative pressures of this overarching ethos that the legitimation matrix and the legitimacy deal of a social order take shape.

The triad of concepts—ethos, legitimation matrix, legitimacy deal—speak to different stages of the process in the course of which suffered injustice becomes politically thinkable as an issue of justice demanding the attention of public authority. Not all experiences of suffering are voiced as grievances. From those that are, only a limited set are recognized as matters relevant to politics and valid objects of policy. The selection of which social phenomena do gain visibility as public concerns and in turn are recognized as being politically relevant is framed by society’s ethos, by shared notions of truth, appropriateness, and acceptability. However, it is a more narrow set of normative and cognitive orientations—those that make up the specific legitimation matrix (ideas of fair distribution of life-chances, as well as what constitutes a life chance)—that determine the thematic scope of the agenda of public debate: which social practices become politicized and thus objects of contestation and which ones are accepted as a matter of course and therefore remain unchallenged. This is a crucial point in my conceptualization of the missing crisis of capitalism (in chapter 5). To the extent that a certain type of social suffering is not politicized, there is no legitimation crisis of the socioeconomic and political order.

The dynamics of politicization are most often, but not exclusively triggered by acts of contestation, when particular experiences are articulated as grievances of suffered injustice, usually through civil society mobilizations. Collective perceptions of what issues count as salient shape the cognitive framework of reference within which public debates are articulated. In other words, the formulation of conflicting positions (e.g., for or against home schooling, for or against gun control) is enabled by a basic overlapping agreement on what counts in the first place as a set of significant social issues that can be an object of meaningful disagreement in the public sphere (Azmanova 2012b). 21 This process of contestation and public debate, in turn, generates a more specific “framework of political reference” that singles out some themes as politically relevant—that is, demanding policy action because they have to do with the fair distribution of life-chances in society as spelled out in the legitimation matrix. Social phenomena such as poverty, inequality, crime, and environmental degradation at some point enter the framework of political reference and gain a chance to be politicized into salient subject matter of political rule. Note, however, how the phenomenon of school shootings, even if it has become a highly important issue in public debates (that is, it has entered the framework of political relevance) has failed to be fully politicized into an object of public policy. In the course of such battles over the politicization of social concerns, a more concrete “legitimacy deal” eventually emerges— a deal spelling out the desirable and feasible political deliverables, actions public authority is expected to undertake in order to remain legitimate.

It is here, in my treatment of legitimacy and legitimation as a process of ongoing politicization spanning from mundane everyday interactions through contestations of the existing order and eventually to policies, that I depart significantly from Jürgen Habermas’s take on legitimacy in his analysis of the legitimation of capitalism. His approach rests on two fundamental assumptions missing in my analysis. The first is that there exists a clear-cut divide between, on one hand, the systems of economic production and political administration and, on the other, the lifeworld of our social togetherness. These two distinct planes of our collective existence contain incompatible action orientations toward success or mutual understanding, respectively (Habermas 1981). Instead, I perceive the fabric of social interactions in terms of interwoven practices that permeate all spheres of life, and whose significance and signification (in the eyes of participants) is secured by a shared societal ethos.

The second assumption I do not take over from Habermas’s treatment is that a system’s legitimacy is something set, a constant that varies only quantitatively. His belief is that we can speak of degrees of legitimacy—that is, there is, in principle, a limit to the penetration of the instrumental rationality of the economic and political systems of democratic capitalism into the lifeworld, beyond which problems of social integration ensue and the systems become beset by legitimation crisis. Even as I endorse this position as a normative ideal (that is, that the vision of a lifeworld free of considerations of efficiency is a good thing to strive for), I cannot endorse it as a reliable ontological model of the social order. Instead, I regard the process of legitimation as a dynamic one: which social phenomena are articulated as features of an acceptable socioeconomic and political order is entirely a matter of their politicization. This takes place within a frame of political reference that spells out issues considered salient for public debate and the desirable and feasible functions of public authority (i.e., the legitimacy deal) in reference to the fair distribution of life-chances in society as spelled out within the basic legitimation matrix.

The perpetually evolving framework of political reference mediates between the distribution of life-chances in society and policy action. This process begins with civil society’s mobilizations in articulating and giving public visibility to systematic occurrences of injustice such as the disproportional power of the wealthiest 1 percent (the Occupy movements), unemployment among the young (the Indignados), complicity between corporate and political elites (the Tea Party movement), or gun ownership (the protests following mass shootings in U.S. schools). This articulation by civil society of concerns with injustice incessantly alters the framework of reference for public debates on justice. In a properly functioning democracy, the channel between civil society and political society (i.e., parties and political institutions) is open. This allows the process of politicization to take place as concerns raised by citizens about injustice are translated as policy issues by political actors struggling to gain public office. In this sense, it is wrong to blame civil society for its failure to affect politics. The job of civil society is to render certain experiences of injustice visible, salient issues of public concern—that is, to politicize them into claims to justice— and thus alter the framework of political reference. The fact that there is no political intake of these concerns into public policy, that political society has become impervious to some forms of grievances voiced by civil society, is a phenomenon to be scrutinized carefully, as we will do in chapter 5. This has much to tell us about the current state of capitalist democracies.