The feeling of not being legitimate is usually read as a lack of self-confidence, to be treated by working on oneself. Max Weber, Pierre Bourdieu and Pierre Rosanvallon help us see it as a social relation, which says more about the place one holds than about what one is worth. I propose the concept of legitimacy to be remade: the legitimacy that the people concerned grant, on each ground, to whoever comes to work with them, and which is lost as soon as one believes oneself established.
A psychological name for a matter of place
In the training sessions I lead, I very often hear cultural professionals say they do not feel “legitimate”. Some are just starting out. More and more, they are also experienced people, recruited to develop projects, who are mostly given logistics to handle and discover that nobody in their department recognises any expertise in them. They end up looking inside themselves for the cause of what they are going through, and they are encouraged to do so, since they are told they suffer from impostor syndrome.
Looking into where the expression comes from, I find that it was coined in 1978 by two psychologists, Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes, who saw in psychotherapy women who had all succeeded in their studies or careers and were nonetheless convinced they did not deserve it. There were more than a hundred and fifty of them. The two psychologists of course saw part of the explanation in family history, but they also spoke of the stereotypes of the time, according to which women supposedly had less intellectual ability than men. In everyday usage, only the family was kept. Doubt became a private matter, to be worked on in therapy or coaching. Yet these women were not illegitimate in themselves; they were illegitimate in a society where they were judged first of all as women.
If you have ever felt illegitimate in your work, I therefore suggest you first look at where you had been placed. In a hierarchical organisation, one is not legitimate in oneself but through one’s place, and the director escapes this no more than the receptionist.
Max Weber showed this in texts written at the beginning of the twentieth century and gathered after his death under the title Economy and Society. For him, no domination lasts long through force alone: those who dominate need others to believe in their legitimacy, whether it comes from tradition, from the charisma of a person or from the legality of offices. A leader’s legitimacy is therefore first of all in other people’s heads. And feeling legitimate means having made one’s own the belief others hold about one’s place.
Pierre Bourdieu gives an image of this that I am very fond of. In Language and Symbolic Power (published in French in 1982 as Ce que parler veut dire), he writes that “authority comes to language from outside, a fact concretely exemplified by the skeptron that, in Homer, is passed to the orator who is about to speak”. In the Iliad, someone stands up in the assembly, a staff is handed to them, and then they are listened to. I find this staff again in my workshops. The person to whom I hand the camera or the drone becomes the one the group listens to, and I make use of this, as I recounted in Artistic Legitimization, Cultural Rights, and Construction of the Individual. In a department, it is the opposite: someone recruited to invent, who is only given logistics, has never received the staff, and their ideas, however excellent, are not heard as proposals.
A legitimacy granted once and for all
But where does the staff come from, and who hands it over? For a long time, in France, the answer was clear. Pierre Rosanvallon recalls it in Democratic Legitimacy, first published in French in 2008: one was legitimate because one had been elected, which he calls the legitimacy of establishment, or because one had passed a civil service examination, and he then speaks of the legitimacy of identification with generality. In both cases, one received one’s legitimacy once and for all, and it followed you as long as you held the post.
Rosanvallon notes that this has no longer been enough since the 1980s, and that citizens expect something else from those who govern them. He names three of these expectations, impartiality, reflexivity and proximity. I dwell on the last one, because I know it well. When I support a team, nobody believes me on the strength of my CV: they trust me, or not, after seeing me work with them. Being legitimate, in this case, means paying attention to particular situations, to people one by one, and it has to be shown over and over again. Rosanvallon is in fact wary of this proximity, which can turn into what he calls a politics of presence: one goes and shakes hands after a disaster, and nothing changes. He is right to be wary. The fact remains that one can now be legitimate without a title, through relationship, and I see this reversal at work well beyond politics.
In culture, I found the same history, with one particularity. For centuries, cultural legitimacy came from closeness to power. I described in Culture and political power : from a marriage of convenience to a consummated divorce how, from Louis XIV onwards, culture served to represent and strengthen power, down to the architecture of Italian-style theatres, where people came as much to be seen and to do business as for the show. In such a system, freedom of programming never existed: one always programmes for someone, and the person who programmes draws their legitimacy from those who appointed them. The person who runs a major cultural venue is, from this point of view, very much like the civil servants Rosanvallon describes, since their appointment serves as a guarantee. Today, whether a mayor goes to the theatre or not no longer changes anything about their power, whereas it once changed everything.
Jacques Rancière helps us think about the other legitimacy. In Hatred of Democracy, first published in French in 2005, he takes up the list of titles to govern that Plato draws up in the Laws: parents over children, the old over the young, masters over slaves, the learned over the ignorant, and a few others. The last title is the drawing of lots, and Rancière sees in it the title of those who have none. Democracy, for him, is just that, the power of anyone at all, resting on no superiority. Cultural rights belong to this way of thinking, since they recognise a cultural legitimacy in every person without asking them to prove it. I developed in Legitimate participation as the horizon of cultural events the case of the Fête de la musique, where anyone who plays in the street is considered legitimate.
These two regimes coexist today, and many professionals suffer from it. People appointed under the old regime still hold most management positions, and they are fully legitimate there in Weber’s sense, since people believe in their office. Others work differently, starting from people and their practices, and often reach a far more diverse range of people, but within a framework where they are not yet recognised. In 2021 the French Ministry of Culture created a General Delegation for Transmission, Territories and Cultural Democracy, which became in 2025 the General Directorate for Cultural Democracy, Education and Research, so the shift is under way. But creating a directorate is not enough to change at once the beliefs of those who work in the sector, and today everyone is legitimate in the eyes of some and not in the eyes of others.
The fable of the kid
In my work I observe another phenomenon, which these authors say little about: the legitimacy received from a relationship cannot be stored up as capital. It has to be remade on each new ground, sometimes with people one thought one knew.
I was recently asked to support an association of cinemas in thinking through its cultural policy. I have known the person who called me for twenty years, and we have worked together before. She told me she had not thought of me at first, because she had kept the image of me from five years ago, that of someone who runs workshops with children. She had heard me in a training session and thought I might be able to help them. With this person who knows me well, I had to show a white paw, to prove that I knew how to do what she was asking. I would have imagined she knew what I do. I could not be offended, since I often change ground: fifteen years ago, I did not support cultural policies, I only ran workshops. Each time I arrive on new ground, I cannot rely on the legitimacy I had elsewhere.
The French expression “montrer patte blanche”, to show a white paw, comes from La Fontaine. In The Wolf, the Goat and the Kid, published in 1668, the goat goes off to graze and leaves her little one a password, to be demanded of anyone who knocks at the door. The wolf, who has heard everything, comes and gives the word. The kid answers:
“Show me a white paw, or I will not open.”
Jean de La Fontaine, “The Wolf, the Goat and the Kid”, 1668.
The password looks very much like a title. In principle it was enough to be let in, and someone who had no right to it was able to use it. The kid, who is inside, asks for proof he can see with his own eyes. In the fable, the door belongs to the one who receives, and he is the one who judges. This is how the legitimacy of proximity is granted, or refused.
I will be told that the kid is wary of a wolf, and that showing a white paw, in everyday French, has something humiliating about it, as if one were suspect on principle. I do not experience it that way. When I sit on a committee where someone does not know me and it matters that this person knows who they are dealing with, I mention two or three things I have done. I did so recently, perhaps insisting a little too much, but people cannot guess. If one gives nothing of oneself, others can receive nothing from it. I am not trying to charm, I am giving the other person something to judge by.
The legitimacy that interests me most is the one I do not control. During a training course in mediation for a federation of cinemas, I had the participants go through several experiences, including the shooting of a short political film. At the end, a young man of nineteen raised his hand to say thank you, and that this was the way to do it. He gave me my legitimacy. He knew nothing of my background, and what I had done twenty years earlier meant nothing to him. He judged on what he had just lived through, and I understood that I had not gone astray, even with people who have no reason to be well disposed towards me.
This is what I call legitimacy to be remade. The people concerned grant it on a specific ground, in the light of what happens there. It does not carry over from one ground to another, and it does not accumulate like capital. It looks more fragile than the legitimacy of a title, and in a sense it is, since it always has to be won again. But it rests on a relationship, whereas the legitimacy of a title can last a long time because people believe in an office, without anyone having looked at what the person who holds it does with it.
Feeling legitimate, a bad sign
I rarely feel legitimate, and I do not think that is a flaw. Many people consider me so, and I know why: because of things I did twenty years ago, which people have remembered, to the point that I am sometimes taken for a sage. That is where I need to be careful. If I felt legitimate with them, I would become too sure of myself, and I would stop listening. Feeling fully legitimate is not necessarily a good sign, because one becomes less open. Constantly doubting one’s own place is a way of remaining available to what happens.
I distinguished in Political awareness and political conscience awareness, through which one agrees to see the diversity of the real, and a clear conscience, that of people who believe they are right and no longer need to look. Living one’s legitimacy as something acquired belongs to the clear conscience. I often see it in the cultural sector, among people who are highly legitimate under the old regime, who think they are doing wonderful things and wait for the public to come and receive them. Deep down, they are not interested in others, and it is starting to show, because it is always the same people who come. Meanwhile, people watch Netflix, YouTube, Instagram or TikTok for several hours a day. These are mass cultural practices, and they take place almost entirely outside us. I often say it in training sessions, to people who believe they are at the centre: we are the marginals of culture, as I wrote in The marginality of cultural institutions. The legitimacy of institutions still holds because people go on believing in their office, not because people come to them.
I am wary, though, of what I have just written. If I can allow myself to doubt, it is because others recognise me. Someone whose hierarchy denies them any expertise did not choose their doubt. It was imposed on them, it hurts, and I am certainly not going to advise them to turn it into a resource. I would rather tell them the story of the violinist in the metro. In January 2007, a Washington Post journalist, Gene Weingarten, asked Joshua Bell, a violinist who fills concert halls all over the world, to play for forty-five minutes in L’Enfant Plaza station in Washington, at the hour when people go to work. More than a thousand people walked past him, only one recognised him, and he earned 32.17 dollars. The music was the same as in a concert hall; all it lacked was the setting in which people would have known how to listen to it. Many people are incapable of hearing what one brings them, and one does not have to carry everything on one’s shoulders. It is better, then, to see clearly where one can act without wearing oneself out, and where one gives one’s energy without receiving anything in return. Those places sometimes have to be left.
A few ways of going about it
I am not saying this is how things should be done. These are ways of thinking I have tested, and that I offer to anyone who has ever wondered whether they were legitimate:
- Distinguishing the place from the person. When I do not feel legitimate, I ask myself what place I am in, and who put me there. I often learn more about the organisation than about myself.
- Asking before whom one needs to be legitimate. A hierarchy, funders, peers and the people one works with do not grant the same legitimacy, nor for the same reasons. I choose to put my energy on the side of the people concerned.
- Saying what one has done. Nobody can guess what I have done elsewhere, and I am learning to say it in a few sentences, without trying to please.
- Entering relationships with no immediate stake. I recently met the new director of a theatre, who sent me his activity report. I reread it and commented on it from the point of view of cultural rights, without a contract or a commission. He was touched by it, and we may work together, or perhaps not. I did not waste my time, since the work made me think, and it is in this kind of bond, where nobody has anything to prove right away, that legitimacy can arise without a title.
- Naming what one does. By placing a practice within a recognised framework, one gives it a legitimacy in law. In France, cultural rights have been written into law since 2015 and 2016, by the NOTRe and LCAP laws, and referring to them helps to defend a project against the obligation of results imposed on it, as I showed in Why the power to act is so often experienced as a transgression.
- Letting the people concerned judge. In a workshop, it is the others, through the way they look, who give value to what each person has made. In the same way, one can accept that the people one works with are the judges of one’s own place, like the kid behind his door.
