Authoritative endogroup

Among competing endogroups, the authoritative one is the group that holds enough coercive force to set the terms everyone else lives by. It does not just have its own view of reality, morality, norms and law. It can impose that view, so its version becomes the official reality, its morality the enforced morality, its norms the default and its law the law. Marsh's point is that authority here is a matter of force, not correctness. The authoritative endogroup defines the shared reality, what she elsewhere calls the authoritative endoreality, because it can, and the same hierarchical structure appears at every scale, from child and parent to family and state, wherever an inequality is forced into an endogroup shape. The group's power to define is what makes dissent from its reality look like error, deviance or crime.

Political theory has many terms for who sets the rules, from sovereignty and hegemony to Gramsci's account of the dominant group's power to make its worldview seem natural. Marsh's authoritative endogroup sits near hegemony but is defined specifically by coercive force and by the power to define reality, morality, norms and law together, and it is tied to her claim that the same endogroup power structure recurs at every scale.