The autopsy of a crisis of legitimacy: the student strike of 2012 and the State

The exacerbation of the confrontation between the student movement and the Liberal government [in Quebec] can be ascribed to the fact that the legal order embodied by the student movement was able to set up against the government, which was attempting to quell the movement, a counter -legitimacy based on direct democracy and reflexive, counterhegernonic practices. The clash between these two legal orders led to a crisis of legitimacy which, in the end, was only resolved by renewing the State's legitimacy through the electoral process. This way out of the crisis allowed the State to oppose its claim to universality against a social taovernent founded above all on a communicative intersubjective rationality that prefigured the recomposition of an oppositional political subject.