could vote only for candidates who were handpicked by the factory owners. Their
only means of getting more were trickery and theft.
Class, Status, and Power
No society has ever been built around pure coercion. A few have come close—the
slave society of the antebellum South, for example, or Romania under Nicolai Ceau-
sescu—but they are always vastly inefficient because they must expend almost all of
their resources on keeping people in line and punishing dissidents. And even there,
the leaders must supplement coercion with other techniques, like persuasion and
indoctrination.
That’s why Max Weber (1978 ed.) argued that power is not a simple matter of
absolutes: Few of us have total power over others, so force won’t work. And few of
us have no power at all, so we rarely have to resort to trickery. Most often, people
do what we want them to do willingly, not because they are being coerced or tricked.
Drivers who obey the speed limits are probably not worried about being fined—after
all, hundreds of cars are zooming past them at 90 mph without punishment. Instead,
they have decided that they want to obey the speed limit, because they’re good citi-
zens and that’s what good citizens do.
In most societies, cultures, subcultures, families, and other groups, coercion
remains a last resort, while by far the most common means of exercising power is
authority. Authorityis power that is perceived as legitimate, by both the holder of
power and those subject to it. People must believe that the leader is entitled to make
commands and that they should obey.
Consider it this way: Although this book is admittedly fascinating, I’m sure that
you would rather be doing something else instead of reading it at this moment. So
why are you here? Are you being coerced? Surely, your professor is not sitting in the
chair next to you, poised to mark an F on your report card the moment your atten-
tion lags. You’re reading because the professor told you to and because you believe
that professors are entitled to tell students to read things. Chances are that if you have
been putting it off for awhile, you felt a sense of relief when you finally began to read.
You believed that you were doing the right thing.
Note that the professor’s authority is not transferable to situations in which you
arenota student. If your professor accosts you on the street and says, “Go pick up
my dry cleaning!” it is unlikely that you will obey. In fact, you might register a com-
plaint with the dean. Nor is it transferable to others in your network. If you intro-
duce your professor to your parents, and he or she then expects them to take notes
as he or she pontificates about current events, you’ll probably just laugh.
Weber argued that leaders exercise three types of authority: traditional author-
ity, charismatic authority, and legal-rational authority.
Traditional Authority
Traditional authorityis a type of power that draws its legitimacy from tradition. We
do things this way because we have always done them this way. In many premodern
societies, people obeyed social norms for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years.
Their leaders spoke with the voice of ancient traditions, issuing commands that had
been issued a thousand times before. They derived their authority from who they were:
the descendants of kings and queens, or perhaps the descendants of the gods, not from
their educational background, work experience, or personality traits.
Traditional authority is very stable, and people can expect to obey the same
commands that their ancestors did. Its remnants still exist today in many social
POLITICS: POWER AND AUTHORITY 457