Discuss Weber’s Concept of Ideal Types in Political Authority, with Reference to Real World Examples.

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Discuss Weber’s concept of ideal types in political authority, with reference to real world examples. It is generally considered that Weber gave the most influential classification of types of authority: these are the traditional, the charismatic and the legal rational type, and each of them is based on obedience (Heywood,2004). Additionally, based on Weber’s view, each of the three political authorities play a specific and significant role in domination (Matheson, 1987). The rulers, the ruled and administrative staff are three elements in each type of authority (Matheson, 1987). This essay will discuss Weber’s three ideal types of political authority in detail, relationships between these three types. Then it will give reasons why legal rational authority has become the dominant type in modern societies and identify some drawbacks of Weber’s political authority theory. Before discussing Weber’s three ideal types of political authority, it is important to find the reason why he generates these three types. As he argued that power is a too multidimensional form to define and therefore he specifically concentrates on domination and distinguishes two main types of it. One of them is the domination by the authority of office, which showed a strong need for obedience from power (Allen, 2004). Weber thought more deeply about his legitimate authority and pointed out that there are three ideal types of it in history. None of these types exist in pure form in the real world, but they can be used as a tool to analyse political issues (Allen, 2004). Moreover, Weber classifies specific political concepts as ‘ideal types’ in order to solve the problem that political concepts are considered as things instead of the tool to understand things. Therefore, it is vital to notice that ideal types are only tools to analyse and should be regarded as how useful they are instead of

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