Literature on power, violence, and authority increased incessantly during the Twentieth Century; but, one cannot say that there has been an agreement regarding the connotations of these concepts. On the contrary, power has become more enigmatic than ever. This article reconstructs the terms of the ever growing distance between transitive and intransitive theories of power, between instrumental and expressive or symbolic theories, between power-violence and powerauthority, and depicts how these fractures have reflected eventually on the theory of «constituent power» an the self-understanding of the representatives in «constituted powers».

