Deontic powers and reasons to act independently of desire

This article analyses Searle’s thesis which states that all political power represents a deontic power related to rights, duties, obligations, authorizations, permissions, authority, etc. This concept leads us to the understanding that power and constituent status functions are irremediably tied to collective acceptance and constitutive rules. Notions like the linguistic constitution of deontic powers, reasons to act independently of desire, normative rationality, and the collective acceptance of political systems, constitute some of the cornerstones of a conceptual frame whose realistic vision of the social, institutional, and political has important implications in the fields of legal, political, and moral philosophy.