Understanding Power: Charisma, Contracts, and Democracy
Understanding Power: From Charisma to Democracy
The charisma of the leader in question, his personal qualities, are, of course, the basis of irrationality. Today, linked to the development of modern democracies, an idea of power tied to a pact is preferred.
The argument put forward by the company’s home and power based on a kind of arrangement is called contractualism (contract or covenant). Authors such as Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau (although all of them with important differences) start from the fact of the existence of a hypothetical State of Nature in which people would live in a state of fear and insecurity. The only way to overcome this situation would be through a covenant that individuals cede power to a person in exchange for security. This would be the source of political and social organization. The advantage of contractualism is that it desecrates the issue of politics and power. It assumes that the social, the nomos of the Greeks, is conventional and therefore changeable, against the theocratic idea of the power of divine origin and therefore immutable.
Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean Jacques Rousseau.
In any case, the exercise of power in increasing social areas and more complex led to a progressive bureaucratization of it. It became necessary to have a government apparatus that gradually led to an administration and a State.
Montesquieu in the eighteenth century noted that the concentration of power was the feature of absolutism and therefore proposed his theory of separation of powers (judicial, executive, and legislative), the foundation of modern democracy. Furthermore, these powers must be controlled and monitored by each other to ensure the better functioning of the State and freedom of citizens. Despite that, we have had recent disastrous examples of this concentration of power (fascism, warlords, single-party regimes, etc.). We have seen how totalitarianism, a political regime based on the concentration of power in the state or a single person, is a threat that fails to conjure. The philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) conducted a major study entitled “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, shocked by the consequences of Nazism, which warned against the destruction of the political space for the alienation of the individual in mass society. She identified as characteristic of totalitarianism the use of propaganda, indoctrination, the use of terror, and the insignificance of the individual against the will of the leader.
At the opposite extreme is anarchism, an ideology that advocates the sharing of power among all citizens which would effectively amount to the dissolution of power itself. Neither God nor master! proclaimed anarchists. Anarchism focuses on the struggle against authority and affirms the absolute freedom of the individual. Authors like Bakunin or Proudhon theorized about a social model anarchist, anti-statism; others do not hesitate to qualify it as at least ‘utopian’.
Baron de Montesquieu, symbol-libertarian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, and Hannah Arendt.
In Western societies, the idea of power is related to the concept of democracy, that is, the idea that power must come from the people so that decision-making lies within it, is an idea of equality and freedom. We speak, from here, of representative democracy when the people elect representatives who then make decisions (councilors, advisors, parliamentarians), and direct democracy, one in which citizens decide directly on issues without (or minimal) intermediaries. However, democracy is based on the search for consensus (majority agreement) and respect for dissent (the right to dissent).
Today we use the term liberal democracy to refer to a model of social organization in which the state is governed by a constitution that guarantees individual rights and political pluralism and is associated with Western democracies. On the other hand, the so-called social democracy has its roots in the socialist movement and tries to combine the tenets of democracy themselves to the protection of civil rights and the development of a welfare state (Citizen protection system which guarantees the right to education, health, safety, work, etc.).
We must be clear that, with all its limitations and imperfections, there is no alternative to democracy and that this should take precedence over any ideological considerations. This is the only containment barrier against totalitarianism.