Understanding Political Power: Legitimacy and Theocracy

Understanding Political Power and Legitimacy

Political power is present in all societies, especially those composed of a large number of people. These societies need organization, and an important element of this organization is leadership. This leadership takes the form of a person or group of people who make decisions that must be obeyed. Coercive power is the power of the state to compel by force of law. This power is enforced by law enforcement agencies.

Defining Legitimacy

Legitimacy, in the context of political power, can be understood in three ways:

1. Origin of Power: This refers to the foundation upon which political power rests. It answers the questions: Where does the power to command come from? Why must that command be obeyed? It is equivalent to being the foundation, the origin, that confers power.
2. Access to Power: This refers to the way in which a person possessing authority has come to hold that power. In what ways has power been attained? This aspect of legitimacy focuses on authorities who have become individuals with the power to command because they have followed procedures deemed suitable for this purpose, i.e., the legitimate means of accessing political power.
3. Exercise of Power: This refers to the actual exercise of power, the laws that the authority enacts. Can the authority command anything? This aspect implies that the laws emanating from the authority are just and fair.

The Divine Origin of Political Power

Throughout history, and across many cultures, it has been common to legitimize authority by stating that power comes from God. This theory is called theocracy. According to this view, it is the gods, or God, who grant a person or a group of people the power to exercise authority on their behalf. In this way, those running the society are not seen as ordinary individuals; they possess something different, a power granted by the divine, which makes obeying them equivalent to obeying the divine, and disobeying them equivalent to disobeying the divine.

Christianity

Christian thinkers argued that power was divided by the will of God into two great arms: the spiritual and the temporal. Spiritual matters belong to the Church, whose head was the Pope. Authority over temporal matters was exercised by other institutions, led by the King. Both the Pope and the King received their power to command from God. This duality of powers created, from the beginning, the problem of the relationship between them. Did either of the powers have superiority over the other? Was the Pope superior to the King, or vice versa?

Islam

Islam, in its fundamentalist interpretations, also maintains a theocratic position regarding authority: Political power comes from God, and the ruler governs society on His behalf. However, in Islam, not only does the authority's power come from God, but so does the law under which people must live, the law revealed in the Qur'an. (In contrast, temporal power comes from God, and the Bible only reflected moral values.) The law, the path revealed by God, is the foundation upon which both the individual lives of people and the structures and laws of Islamic governments must be based. The ideal Islamic society requires the integration of religion into the political sphere. (There is no separation of powers). The people can participate in choosing those who will be government officials, but the action of these individuals is not to legislate, but to enforce the law revealed by God.