Normalized legal power shapes everyday life far more than brutality does

Evidence

Everyday social life is determined to a much greater extent by recourse to normalized power, i.e. legal power, than by the brutal and selfish exercise of power. Exceptions limited to certain areas actually serve to illuminate this state of affairs. Intervention by legitimate force is more considerable; one simply cannot think it away without disrupting and transforming almost all normal social life. Brutality and selfishness are phenomena which are compatible with many social conditions so long as they do not undermine the dominance of institutionalized power. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 612

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Weber’s legitimate domination and to Ishiguro’s Stevens serving institutional ‘normalized power’ unquestioningly — the very banality of everyday legal power is what lets Stevens defer ethics to the system. — connects to: Ordinary daily experience is shaped by the political powers that rule it. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 667; Domination persists amid law as lower-intensity arbitrary household and workplace power — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 301