Political Concepts

The foundational concepts of political theory this atlas treats independently of any one country, government or ideology: what a state and its sovereignty are, what makes a government's authority legitimate, the structural principles that constrain how power is exercised once held, the concepts describing citizens acting toward or against political authority, and the tradition- or religion-derived sources of legitimacy alongside the modern consent-based ones. Organized into five subcategories by the concept's own place in that sequence, from Sovereignty and the State through Traditional and Religious Legitimacy Concepts, following Andrew Heywood's standard political-theory organization crossed with Max Weber's typology of legitimate authority.