Bras. Political Sci. Rev.2010;4(1):155-64.
The Legitimacy of Power as an Object of Political Science
DOI: 10.1590/1981-3870201000010006
Political Science and Political Power
The various sorts of bureaucratic rules, constitutional texts, government systems and other institutional frameworks that “gave shape” to the Western State emerged as a consequence of long-running processes of legitimization of certain social groups’ political power. According to Max Weber’s sociology of domination, it is critical to regard the social structures that allowed for the legitimacy of certain practices in the exercise of power as a specialized social sphere. The differentiation of politics in western societies motivated the construction of a worldview about the State, as well as the emergence of political thinkers — “spirits of State” in acceptation.
One of the objects of the strand of historical sociology focused on the comparison of revolutionary processes that redounded in reconfigurations of the centralization of political power by different actors is the analysis of these long processes and their variants. This approach highlights the specificity of the dynamics of State formation — breaking away from ideas that see political development as the emulation of certain so-called universals — and relates the courses of action taken by political actors to national worldviews and the emergence of institutional forms.
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