Political Philosophy Part 4: Power, Authority & the State

Weber — Power & Authority

Max Weber (1864-1920) gave the canonical sociological definitions. Power (Macht) is the probability that one actor can carry out his will despite resistance. Authority (Herrschaft) is power that those subject to it accept as legitimate — they comply not merely because they must, but because they believe they should.

Weber distinguished three pure types of legitimate authority:

• Traditional — Authority by long-established custom. Kings rule because their fathers did; the village elder is heeded because elders are heeded.
• Charismatic — Authority from the perceived extraordinary qualities of an individual leader (Jesus, Napoleon, Gandhi, Mandela). Inherently unstable; collapses or "routinizes" after the leader's death.
• Legal-rational — Authority by impersonal rules and procedures, embodied in modern bureaucratic states. The official commands obedience because of the office, not the person; the rule applies because it was duly enacted.

Weber also gave the famous definition of the modern state: an entity that successfully claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note all three qualifiers — the monopoly is claimed (not always achieved); the force must be legitimate (not all violence counts); the territory is bounded.

Hobbes — The State as Necessity

Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) gave the classical case for sovereign authority. Imagine humans without political organization — the "state of nature." For Hobbes, this is a state of war "of every man against every man" in which life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Without an enforcer, no contracts can be relied on, no industry undertaken, no peace secured. Reason itself counsels exit from this condition.

The exit is the social contract: each person surrenders her right to govern herself to a sovereign — preferably a single absolute ruler — who alone retains the right to use force, to make law, and to interpret the law. The sovereign's authority is not contractual with the subjects (the sovereign is not a party to the contract) but absolute. Subjects have only one ultimate right: to defend themselves against the sovereign's attempt on their lives, since self-preservation was the original motivation for the contract.

Hobbes is not a defender of tyranny. He is making the case that any functioning sovereign is preferable to no sovereign — that the threat of civil war (then ravaging England) is so terrible that even harsh order is to be preferred to its alternatives. This is the foundational case for the state, and it has shaped political philosophy ever since whether one accepts or rejects it.

Marx — Class Power

The most influential 19th-century challenge to liberal political philosophy. Karl Marx argued that the apparently neutral institutions of the liberal state — equal law, free contract, representative government — are not in fact neutral. They are the legal and ideological superstructure of a particular economic base: capitalism, in which a class that owns the means of production (the bourgeoisie) extracts surplus value from a class that owns only its labor power (the proletariat).

The state, on the Marxian analysis, is not the impartial arbiter it claims to be. It is "the executive committee of the bourgeoisie" — an institution whose ultimate function is to maintain the conditions under which the dominant class can continue to extract value. Liberal rights are real but limited; they protect property, contract, and exchange but not the economic conditions that would let workers actually exercise meaningful freedom.

Whatever one's view of Marxist solutions (much disputed), the analytical contribution is permanent: any serious political theory now has to consider the way economic power conditions political power, and to ask whose interests a given institution actually serves rather than only what it claims to be. The 20th-century liberal-socialist debate is largely about how much of Marx's diagnosis can be accepted while rejecting his prescriptions.

Foucault — Power Everywhere

The most consequential late-20th-century reframing. Michel Foucault argued that the classical question — who has sovereign power, and is it legitimate? — captures only one form of power, and not the most important one in modern societies. Power is not primarily something some people have and others lack; it is something that operates throughout the social field, in countless capillary relations of knowledge, surveillance, classification, and discipline.

Two of Foucault's key concepts:

• Disciplinary power — Operates through institutions that train bodies and minds: the school, the factory, the army, the prison, the hospital. Through timetables, examinations, surveillance, and standardized routines, these institutions produce particular kinds of subjects — docile, productive, classifiable. The model is Bentham's Panopticon: a structure in which the possibility of being watched is enough to produce self-monitoring.
• Biopower — Power exercised over populations as biological entities. Statistics, public health, demographic management, eugenics, contemporary debates over reproduction and disease. The state's interest extends from the individual subject's body to the optimization of the population's life.

The political implication is uncomfortable. Resisting power is not simply a matter of rejecting tyranny or fighting the bourgeoisie. We are constituted as subjects by the very power relations we might want to resist; our self-understandings, our desires, our sense of normality are themselves products of disciplinary processes. There is no pre-political "real self" beneath the conditioning to liberate. Resistance is possible — Foucault never denied it — but it operates within networks of power, not outside them.

Arendt — Political Action

Hannah Arendt offers an importantly different conception. Power, in her account, is not the ability to coerce. Coercion she calls violence — the instrumental use of force, which any individual may possess. Power is something only a plurality of people acting together generates. Power emerges when humans appear to one another in public, speak with one another, deliberate, and commit to common action. It dissipates when they disperse.

This is why, on Arendt's analysis, the most violent regimes are also the most paradoxically powerless: they have replaced the political (the space of plural action) with terror, and terror is what authorities resort to when their power has eroded. Conversely, popular movements — civil rights, the Velvet Revolution, the early stages of the Arab Spring — generate enormous power without violence, simply by people standing together publicly.

Whether Arendt's conception captures all of what we mean by power is debatable; that it captures something Weber, Marx, and Foucault all under-theorize is increasingly accepted.