Thus, cultural power is essentially based on organization and segregation. The means by which the culturally powerful obtain and maintain their power is the organization principle itself. Weber explains it thus: "Domination in the most general sense is one of the most important elements of social action" (Weber "Domination and Legitimacy" 42) and again lays out the organizing essence that serves as the basis of domination: "The purest type of the former is monopolistic domination in the market; of the latter, patriarchal, magisterial, or princely power" (Weber "The Distribution of Power within the Political Community:Class, Status, Party" 943). In other words, the more organized the structure in terms of concentrating power in the hands of a few, the more monopolistic the power play becomes. This theory is no surprise coming from Weber who is the father of modern day bureaucracy.
Antonio Gramsci view cultural power as having a political basis, which is why he discusses at length the influence of Machiavelli, Savonarola, and others in his Prison Notebooks. He poses the framework in these questions: In what sense can one identify politics with history, and hence all of life with politics? How then could the whole system of super-structures be understood as distinctions within politics...?" (137). For Gramsci, the means of power are political and the special social group that acquires power is the group with the most relevant political…