Power, authority, legitimacy and key concepts

Political Science · Foundations of political science. The idea in plain words, the rules to remember, the mistake to avoid and a worked example, written and checked by Mega Lecture.

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The idea

Power is the ability to get others to do what they would not otherwise do. Authority is power that people accept as rightful. Legitimacy is that quality of rightfulness, the belief that a ruler or system has the right to rule. A regime can hold power without legitimacy, but it then depends on force.

Max Weber named three pure types of legitimate authority: traditional, charismatic and legal-rational.

Four values recur in every paper. Liberty is freedom to act; equality is the absence of unfair privilege; justice is giving each person what is due; rights are claims recognised by society and enforced by the state. They support each other, yet liberty and equality can also pull in opposite directions.

Rules to remember

Weber: power is the chance to carry out one's will even against resistance; the state claims a monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a territory.
Traditional authority rests on custom; charismatic on the leader's personal qualities; legal-rational on lawfully enacted rules and offices.
Legality (made by the correct procedure) is not the same as legitimacy (accepted as rightful).
Isaiah Berlin, 'Two Concepts of Liberty' (1958): negative liberty = freedom from interference; positive liberty = self-mastery, freedom to realise one's potential.
J. S. Mill, 'On Liberty' (1859): the harm principle. John Rawls, 'A Theory of Justice' (1971): justice as fairness, the veil of ignorance.
Kinds of equality: legal, political, social, economic, and equality of opportunity. Kinds of rights: natural, civil, political, economic and social.
Every right implies a duty on others to respect it.

Common mistake

Weber's types describe why people obey, not how good the ruler is. An elected leader with great personal appeal still holds legal-rational authority if obedience rests on the office and the law.

Worked example

A revolutionary leader whom followers obey out of personal devotion dies. His successors set up a constitution, courts and a civil service. In Weber's terms, what has happened to authority?

Obedience out of devotion to one person's exceptional qualities is charismatic authority.
Charisma belongs to the person, so it cannot simply be passed on at death.
Obedience now rests on written rules and offices, which is legal-rational authority.

Answer: Authority has moved from the charismatic to the legal-rational type (Weber called this the routinisation of charisma).

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