Democratic dictatorship: political legitimacy in Marxist perspective

This article aims to contextualise, explain and defend the relevance of Marx’s analysis of the dictatorship of the proletariat for contemporary debates on political legitimacy. I call my reconstruction of the Marxist contribution to this debate: the limited legitimacy theory of political authority. Such a theory, I contend, offers a plausible alternative to existing liberal and anarchist accounts and has important implications for a number of key debates in political theory, including the normative significance of the state, the relationship between authority and freedom, the role of democracy, and the meaning and relevance of communist utopia.