The impressively growing literature on legitimation has produced not so much a further clarification of the concept as rather a number of new interpretations and an extension of the topics discussed under it. This extension has involved not only a more detailed analysis of the concrete mechanisms of the process of legitimation, but also a multiplication of the objects of legitimation: the notion of legitimacy is not applied to social systems as wholes as well as to political regimes, concrete governments and even to specific measures of governmental policy.