No doubt you’re correct about the contingent connection between subjective legitimation and objective power. Legitimation signals acquiescence, which leads to boldness on the part of the powerful.

It’s just that I wouldn’t want to go from that connection to a necessary connection between the two which is involved in your retrospective example. Just because some act or figure is legitimated, doesn’t make them powerful. For instance, Empress Alexandra had more legitimacy than Grigori Rasputin, but he seemed to have a power over her. And, of course, just because a person is powerful, doesn’t make them legitimated; the ‘barrel-of-a-gun’ theme may possibly in some examples involve elements of group trust and so on, but the point of the example was not to rule that out as a possibility, but just to point out that is not always the case that we can rule out that power derives from a source entirely apart from acquiescence.

I think your distinction between intra- and inter- normal kinds of power tracks the distinction between acquiescence and negotiation. When a person’s use of power is immediately regarded as legitimate, then it is a function of trust and/or apathy. When it’s not so immediate, we are in the realm of negotiation and persuasion. It is the latter which seem to me to be the explanations which are more responsibly susceptible to the “social contract” description. But anyway these are all thoughts which find some parallel in the remarks you’ve already made.

The difference between acquiescence and negotiation itself appears to be in some part fed by the level of interest and involvement which the subject has. All other things equal, the subject has greater organizational power in a negotiation scenario simply because they are more interested and untrusting, while the power-wielder depends on apathy and trust. To this extent, the power-wielder has their power through the absence of friction, and would support your desire to emphasize acquiescence.

Still, though, if this were the whole story, then we wouldn’t seem to be talking about power at all. Rather, we’d seem to be talking about mere persuasion and influence. Fear needs to be a component (or at least a possible component) in order for power to be said to be involved. It strikes me as bogus to say that, for instance, an advertising executive has power over people just because she can make advertisements. Rather, it seems more like she has power because she can use her profits unscrupulously, or by cluttering public space with billboards regardless of common irritation.

This demands that we revisit your formulation of power akin to goal-achievement. It may be the case that, in order to make maximum usefulness out of our natural language distinctions, we may need to say something else. We may need to say that power is the kind of influence which is capable of achieving success of some goal in spite of the possible resistence of those subject to it. (Elias Cannetti had something like this in mind in his work, “Crowds and Power”.)

The effects on this on your analysis might or might not be negligable. We can still say that acquiescence is deeply involved in power, in that the acquiescence of the many is power insofar as the few dissenters are inevitably forced to comply to this-or-that. But we’d have to take the role of fear to heart.