“The Types of Legitimate Domination"

1. “The Types of Legitimate Domination" Max Weber (1925)

2. Types of legitimate domination • Summary: • Specifies the characteristics and effects of domination (authority) and legitimacy as they relate to legal authority and bureaucratic administration • Examines historical context &relationship w/ capitalism, finding: • bureaucratic administration under capitalist system leads to social levelingvia technical expertise, and a formalistic and utilitarian impersonality • sophisticated transportation and communication systems tend to create more, not less, bureaucracy

3. Domination/Authority • Domination/authority: the probability that certain specific commands (or all commands) will be obeyed by a given group of persons • Implies voluntary compliance, or an interest in obedience • Requires a staff, or a special group that can normally be trusted to execute the general policy as well as the specific commands • Obedience can result from the following motives: • Custom • Affective ties • Material interests – purely material interests, however, result in a relatively unstable situation • Ideal • Belief in legitimacy

4. Ideal types of legitimate authority • Authority is defined by claim to legitimacy • Weber specified three types: • Rational-legalauthority: rests on a belief in the legality of enacted rules • Traditional authority: rests on the established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions • Charismatic authority: rests on the devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person

5. Legal Authority • Legal Authority rests on the acceptance of the following mutually interdependent ideas: • Any given legal norm may be established by agreement or by imposition, on grounds of expediency or value rationality or both, with a claim to obedience at least on the part of the members of the organization • Every legal norm consists essentially in a consistent system of abstract rules that have been intentionally established • The superior is subject to an impersonal order by orienting his actions to it in his own dispositions and commands • The person who obeys authority does so as a member of the organization and what he obeys is the only law • The person who obeys authority does not obey a person in authority as an individual, but rather as the superior of an impersonal order

6. Traditional authority • The commands of a traditional authority are legitimized in one of two ways: • partly in terms of tradition • partly in term’s of the master’s discretion • So far as action follows principles at all, they’re things like ethical commonsense, equity, or utilitarian expediency • Not formal principles

7. Charismatic authority • Charismatic authority depends on relationship between leader & followers • Recognition of charisma by subjects • Leadership must somehow benefit followers • Charismatic community forms and is animated by charismatic qualities of leader & followers • Charisma constitutes a “call,” “mission,” or “spiritual duty” • despises traditional or rational everyday economizing or seeking regular income thru continuous economic activity • Charisma has revolutionary force, it’s often transformative

8. Routinization of charisma • By definition charismatic authority is exceptional, not an everyday thing • Charisma either fades away or becomes routinized • It cannot remain stable but must become traditionalized or rationalized or both • Motives behind the transformation: • Ideal and material interests of followers in the continuation of the community • Still stronger ideal and stronger material interests of staff, disciples, and party workers continuing relationship

9. Has capitalism turned us all into rational actors out to maximize our material self-interest? • Does instrumental rationality accurately characterize most social action? • Does it even characterize our economic behavior? • Other motivations to consider?

10. House of Sand and Fog (2003) • Storyline: An abandoned wife is evicted from her home and starts a tragic conflict with the house's new owners • The ‘American Dream’ gone awry