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"The critical German edition of Max Weber’s work, together with the French translation of some of its fundamental texts, gives the opportunity to shed new light upon the pure types of legitimate domination. This article scrutinizes the genesis of the three ideal types and analyzes the question of the trilogy. It demonstrates that other choices were theoretically possible, insisting especially on feudal domination and output legitimacy ; this enables, in turn, to underline the specificity of Weber’s analysis. The quickly abandoned Weberian idea of a fourth – democratic – mode of legitimate domination is a symptom of the difficulty that the sociologist faces when he needs to conceptualize and concretely analyze democracy or the resistance of the subalterns. These reflections impel towards the construction of a pure ideal type of democracy – or of democratization – which, in order to be able to analyze empirical sociopolitical developments, should be articulated with the pure types of legitimate domination."