Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Law is primarily about voluntary submission, not power Power is itself largely a product of voluntary submission, which radiates out. When some people voluntarily submit to the putative leadership, including in its request to back up the leaders orders with force when necessary, to report violations, etc., it increases the inclination of other people of others to submit without force being directly applied, and so…
This is a semantic argument. I agree that power flows from consensus. When it doesn't, we're talking about coercion, force, and violence, not power. But the word power is often used colloquially to mean those things: coercion, force, violence, and that's how I was using it.
What argument?
> I agree that power flows from consensus.
That’s...not what I said, really.
> When it doesn't, we're talking about coercion, force, and violence, not power
“Power”, at least in the social sense, is the ability to get people to act as you wish; idealized moral or rational persuasion is one mechanism of that, the direct application or imminent threat of violence is a mechanism, and there’s a whole spectrum in between. But a leader’s ability, in practice, to apply power (by any mechanism) over a population is largely due to the successful use of power to influence a group of agents to act on behalf of the leader, and their application of power to others, etc. We might talk as if the state is a real concrete thing, but its really just an abstraction of the penumbra of indirect power emanating outward from the leadership.