Political Power: Legitimacy, Types, and Social Impact

Psychic Nature of Political Power

The psychic aspect of political power, in the search for acceptance, lies in the conviction of the notion of legitimacy by those who are dominated. When power is legitimate, it is constituted in accordance with certain dominant beliefs. Therefore, there is not one single form of legitimacy (e.g., democracy, monarchy, communism).

Different Types of Political Power

According to Bertrand Russell

• Traditional: Where consent reigns.
• Revolutionary: Where ideology prevails.
• Naked: Where coercion prevails.

According to Maurice Duverger

• Immediate Power: Characteristic of primitive cities, with a fuzzy generalization of the entire group.
• Institutionalized Power: Subject to specific legal rules established for the purpose.

Issues of Politics

Politics focuses on the demands of a collective order of freedom and economic justice. Politics and history are presented as man's efforts to achieve freedom and justice, replacing the law of the strongest with law, and organizing the community consistently, voluntarily, and consciously.

Fear and insecurity have transformed the lives of men and have launched the search for a new form of economic, social, and political organization that ensures man's realization as a spiritual being. This crisis, which embraces the focus on the issue, transcends the social sphere.

Politics and Social Function

• Society is politicized to the extreme.
• Economic, social, and cultural techniques determine factors, shapes, symbols, beliefs, and institutions that grow.
• Political life is permeated by social life, and the social function of the state is the characteristic note of the political form of society today.
• Political mechanisms used by the government of a society that do not serve the current society should meet democratic content.

Fundamental Political Problems

Freedom, as man's dominion over himself, and property, as man's dominion over things, are two problems that must be solved with technical politics, science, and philosophy:

1. The Freedom-Authority Relationship: The action of the individual and the community over each other and the limits of that action.
2. Eliminating Poverty: By eliminating the exploitation of man, social inequalities, and artificial barriers.