SOCI 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Elite Theory, Natural And Legal Rights, Charismatic Authority
Lecture 11 - Social Institutions 4: Government &
Politics + Ch. 17
• Outline:
• Government & politics as a social institution
• What is power?
• What is a nation-state?
• What is a government?
• Sociological perspectives on government & politics
• Functionalism
• Conflict theory
• Postmodernism
•
Government & Politics as a Social Institution
• Political science
• How to govern over others
• Selecting government
• Great focus on formal politics & political parties
•
Political sociology
• Looks at politics as a social organization of power & power relations
• Institution of politics - governs our behaviours related to decision
making, recourses & domination
• Focused on everyday power relations
• What is
power?
• Marx
• Power is a social relationship, based on ownership & means of
production
• Society has a base - economy, means & relations of production -
economy
• Super structure - politics, law
• People with connections to the base, have more power
• Weber
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• Ability of a group to achieve goals / aims when others are trying to
prevent them from this
• Impose your will over others, even if others resist or don't accept your
power
• Authority = power + legitimacy
• Authority is a socially acceptable power
• (EX) Police having the authority to kill others
• Accepted power
• Plays an important role in domination
• Foucault
• Power is everywhere (family, schools, organizations)
• Everyone has power
• When people unit, they can change the rules & regulations
• Diffused & embodied in discourse, knowledge & regimes of truth
• Circle of objectivity
• Nation-State
• Modern concept
• Political unit that is linked to society
• With a common culture, language
• Nation - group of people who have common culture, language, history
• When this nation has a common geographical area - this is a nation-state
• Peace of Westphalia
• 1648 - 80 year long war b/t Spain & Dutch & German
• Foundation of the modern state system and territorial sovereignty
• Each party as a separate entity
• Sovereignty
• Nation-state has the freedom to make its own law
• Empire - absolute monarch
• A geographically widespread organization of individual states, nations,
and peoples that is ruled by a centralized government; the contemporary
supra-national, global form of sovereignty whose territory is the entire
globe and whose nodes in “its network form of power” include the
dominant nation-states, supranational institutions, and major capitalist
corporations
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