Instruction
In the section on the concept of rational authority, this is where you can go into discussion about the rule of law which is now dominant in all European and Western societies. You can discuss things such as the role of the legislature in creating law, the role of police and courts in enforcing laws, and the fact that no one is above the law. All of these are contemporary everyday uses of rational legal authority.
Your discussion of traditional authority needs some work. Police did not rule by traditional authority. The rule on the basis of rational legal authority. Traditional authority is the divine right of kings. It would be in place during the medieval period under feudalism. It would also be the basis of authority by religious institutions such as the Catholic Church. Please make sure you include these kind of examples so that it's clear what traditional authority represents. Traditional authority has been downplayed since the rise of the Enlightenment in the modern nation state. In which rational legal authority has become dominant.
Please try to put this more in your own words because your use of the phrases from the essays themselves become too confusing at times.
my discussion of charismatic authority is much better. Charismatic authorities often emerged to take on traditional authority, claiming that they had received new messages from God or the supernatural and could thus create new rules and overturn the existing order. The demonstration for charismatic authority is the ability to perform miracles. Give examples of people who in history claimed they could perform miracles such as healings. Jesus would certainly be an example.
Contemporary charismatic figures might include people who lead dramatic revolutions like Mahatma Gandhi, or Martin Luther King. Even though they did not perform miracles They were able to through their charismatic personalities bring about major changes, such as the overthrow of the British government in India and the establishment of civil rights for African-Americans. The problem with charismatic authority is that it is not easily passed on from one generation to another. Does the phrase the routinization of charisma up here in this essay?
It deals with this phenomenon.
(The theory section needs work. please discuss power and legitimacy as my two theories). instead of discussing those concepts i have gone back to my concepts and simply repeated them doing so i have done that section wrong. The whole essay is about power. Which is the ability to make people do things against their will that they do not want to do. Weber would argue that this is true of all history. Just like Karl Marx would claim that all history is a history of class struggle. In primitive societies power, being bigger and stronger, males dominating females, etc. would be typical. Weber's point is that as society has developed it created ways to legitimize power.
The point of the essay theoretically is that power must be legitimized so that people will not only obey it because of force, but because they see it as appropriate to do so. The three concepts, traditional, charismatic and rational legal, then are different forms of legitimating power. That can be your second theory.
Don't forget you need to go back to the section from Reynolds that goes over the five types of theories to pick what type of theories Each one of these represent. Actually, they are both empirical generalizations. But write this up so it is clear that you understand why these are empirical generalizations and not testable hypotheses or laws, etc. which are the other forms of theories.