 For Bentham and Austin, law is a phenomenon of societies with a sovereign: a determinate person or group who have supreme and absolute de facto power—they are obeyed by all or most others but do not themselves similarly obey anyone else. The laws in that society are a subset of the sovereign’s commands: general orders that apply to classes of actions and people and that are backed up by threat of force or “sanction”. This imperatival theory is positivist, for it identifies the existence of law with patterns of command and obedience that can be ascertained without considering whether the sovereign has a moral right to rule or whether their commands are meritorious. It has two other distinctive features. The theory is monistic: it represents all laws as having a single form, imposing obligations on their subjects, though not on the sovereign itself. The imperativalist acknowledges that ultimate legislative power may be self-limiting, or limited externally by what public opinion will tolerate, and also that legal systems contain provisions that are not imperatives (for example, permissions, definitions, and so on). But they regard these as part of the non-legal material that is necessary for every legal system. (Austin is a bit more liberal on this point). The theory is also reductivist, for it maintains that the normative language used in describing and stating the law—talk of authority, rights, obligations, and so on—can all be analyzed without remainder in factual terms, typically as concatenations of statements about power and obedience.