Legitimate Power in a Mediated Age: Revisiting Carl J. Friedrich's “Authority, Reason and Discretion”

Abstract

Although scholars of political communication study legitimacy and power consistently, we often overlook older works on the topic from political theory and philosophy that might give us guidance in a mediated age. Friedrich was a contemporary of Lazarsfeld, Merton, and so many of the great 20th-century social scientists we look to as providing the foundations for our field. This essay asks that we go back to Friedrich as well, and to others who found authority to be one of our most complex and important social phenomena.

Keywords:

• communication theory
• public opinion
• classical tradition
• conversation
• political discourse

Notes

Susan Herbst is Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of Political Science at the University of Albany, State University of New York.

1. I am grateful to David Paletz for inspiring this essay. It took me 20 years to write, but his notion that authority is central to all political communication dynamics is a compelling one that some of us are still processing.