If people obey a command because they fear the consequences of refusing, they are responding to power. If they obey because they believe they should, they are responding to authority. Authority is that subtype of power that is accepted as legitimate.
Max Weber, , in his book Society and Economy defined power as the “probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests.” Weber conferred, in his works, the concept of power is sociologically amorphous brought into act by an individual under demanding circumstances. On the other hand, Max Weber defined authority as the “probability that a command with a given content will be obeyed by a given group of persons.”
Max Weber distinguished three different types of authority.
- Traditional authority involves an appeal to custom and ancient practice.
- Legal-rational authority involves obedience to formal rules, which have been established by proper procedure: civil servants who distribute passports according to the regulations of a bureaucratic organisation can invoke this sort of authority for their actions with charismatic authority.
- The charismatic leader is obeyed because followers believe he or she possesses an extraordinary character (usually derived from a special relationship with the divine) that trumps existing rules or prevalent customs. An exemplar is the Christ figure in the New Testament who presents his radically innovative teachings in the form ‘It is written … but I say to you …’ and justifies his rejection of the tradition only with the claim to be the Son of God.
Very loosely we can understand much about the differences between pre-modern and modern societies by noting that traditional authority is prevalent in the former and legal-rational authority (especially as embodied in bureaucratic organisations) dominates the latter. Charismatic authority may periodically appear in all sorts of societies but it is less common in modern societies.
Weber then argues that, at a high level of abstraction, where the whole range of historical reality can be encompassed conceptually by few ideal-typical constructs, that argument has always had one or the other of three contents, each characterizing a distinctive kind of authority.
- Traditional authority. This rests on reverence for the past, on the assumption that what has always been the case is sacred and deserves to persist.
- Charismatic authority: Here, the commands are issued by a person to whom transcendent forces have imparted a “gift of grace,” enabling that person to perform extraordinary feats that bear witness to the power of those forces and benefit those who follow the person in question.
- Legal authority: Here, single commands constitute correct instantiations of rules of lesser or greater generality, valid in turn because they have been formed and enacted according to certain procedural rules.