ABSTRACT
Most of our ideas about authority have emanated from the work of Max Weber, who gave us the most basic and up to now most pervasive ideas about how power becomes authority through what he considered its three basic legitimations: traditional authority, rational-legal authority, and charisma. Georg Simmel, a German sociologist even more influential than Weber in his day, also wrote about authority, and his excursus on "Superordination and Subordination" remains one of the most inventive ways of thinking about the relationship of authority to power. French sociology was also quick to become interested in the nationalistic forces boiling up in Europe, and in the new movements to consolidate power and to create the basis of legitimate authority in France and neighboring states. Aristocratic recruitment consolidates power and authority in the hands of a relatively few families over multiple generations, while democratic recruitment emphasizes rejuvenation of elites by bringing up new talented individuals from the lower and middle classes.
