Week 2 — Power, Authority, Legitimacy & the State

Why this matters

A nursing student watching a whole floor follow the charge nurse and a business major watching a new manager try to win a team's trust both meet this week's question: what turns raw power into a right to rule?

In plain language

This week asks why anyone obeys a government at all. Power (the ability to make someone do what you want) is not the same as authority (power that people accept as rightful), and neither is the same as legitimacy (the shared belief that a whole system deserves obedience). You will learn what makes something a state (the lasting institution that rules a territory) and how it differs from a nation and from a government. Then you will read three famous answers to the question "why obey?" from Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, and test all three on a made-up country whose dictator has fallen and left no government behind.

• Already covered: Week 1 taught you to sort a claim as empirical or normative.
• This week: power, authority, and legitimacy; Weber's three types; the state; sovereignty; and Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.
• How they connect: you sort every fragment you read by kind, as in Week 1.
• Where we're going next: Week 3, Political Ideologies.

Focus

Why obey anyone at all, and what turns raw power into a right to rule?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• [ ] tell power, authority, and legitimacy apart in a new case
• [ ] sort authority into Weber's three types and check a place against the four criteria of a state
• [ ] credit each pinned fragment to Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau without a swap
• [ ] apply all three answers to a new country, each at full strength

To-do

Plan your week

1. Read Chapter 2 (about 45 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
2. Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
3. Do the Political Analysis Workshop (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
4. Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: credit "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short" to the right thinker and say what he fears most.

You've got this

Take it in order, and ask your instructor early if you get stuck.

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