Politics and Defining Power

Politics and Defining Power

To understand Politics, we need to understand three other terms,

society, government and authority, as all three are what politics

revolves around.

Politics is society; Society is a community and everything the

community involves, culture, religion and things such as social class.

Society is organised by politics. Politics in a society deal with

disagreements or conflicts. Within a society, there will always be

different groups with different opinions, something is needed to make

sure these groups, are able to co-exist, this is politics. Politics is

needed to decide who in a society should hold authority over the other

people in a society, the allocation of authority.

Authority itself however is complicated as it has more than one area

of meaning. Authority can actually be three different things within

society; Max Weber a German sociologist defines these 3 meanings.

Weber divided authority into traditional authority, charismatic

authority and rational-legal authority. An example of traditional

authority would be the English Monarchy. This is self explanatory, as

it is traditional that the Monarchy holds some sort of authority. An

example of charismatic authority would be a character such as Jesus

Christ; he was not given any authority via politics nor was he born

with any, such as a monarch. He gained his Authority through his

charismatic abilities. An example of legal rational authority would be

a member of the judiciary such as a judge, the authority is not in the

person it is in the title they hold or the job they do.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary has more than one definition for

politics....

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Russia ran by Stalin or communist Cuba ran by Fidel Castro. It would

be nice to believe that coercive power should never be needed and

democracy existed world wide, but its not going to happen. Also is

democracy the only answer, as with democracy there is always going to

be a "minority" that is overruled, so at any one point, not everyone

is going to be happy. To answer my own question I asked earlier

"without government, society would be chaos?" yes, I think it would. I

don't feel qualified to state what would solve all the worlds'

political problems, but I do feel qualified to say that there is

always going to be someone who is unhappy, so do we try and make them

happy and make someone else unhappy, or do we just go with it and try

and make as many people happy as possible and say "tough luck" to the

minority?