Practice question · Match the pairs
Match each of Weber’s three types of legitimate domination to the ground on which obedience rests.
- Traditional authority
- Charismatic authority
- Legal-rational authority
- The sanctity of arrangements that have always existed
- Belief in enacted rules and in the office rather than the person
- Devotion to the exceptional qualities of one person
Hints
- One of the three attaches to a person and disappears when that person does.
- Only one of the three survives a change of office-holder without disruption.
Show the answer
- Traditional authority → The sanctity of arrangements that have always existed
- Charismatic authority → Devotion to the exceptional qualities of one person
- Legal-rational authority → Belief in enacted rules and in the office rather than the person
Why
The third is the one that scales, because obedience is owed to a position rather than to a man, and positions can be filled indefinitely. That is why Weber treated bureaucracy as the purest expression of it, and why he thought the charismatic type is inherently unstable: it must either dissolve or be routinised into one of the other two.
Practise The European Consolidation: Durkheim, Weber and Tönnies
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