PHi3001 Reason and Legitimacy

Dear all,

Tuesday’s lecture was a brief analysis of the concept of power, in which we arrived at the 1st dimension (as coined by Lukes, 2005): A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that he would not otherwise do. Next week, we shall be moving on to the concept of authority in order to attempt to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate uses of power, that is between benign paternalism and bullying.

You need to have read the Rousseau hand-out by next week as we will start with a quick discussion of that before moving on to the concept of authority itself. The hand-out can be downloaded from Blackboard.

Lukes, S. (2005) Power: a radical view, is available from the library as an electronic text, so you should be able (if you are on campus or logged in!) to access it by clicking here.

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