I
The idea of authority has no single historical
definition.
Originally, its dominant meaning was the capacity to
evoke
voluntary compliance or assent, on grounds
distinct from coercive power or
rational conviction.
Currently, its dominant meaning is the capacity
to
evoke compliance or assent, whether voluntary or not,
on grounds
which confer an official right upon coercive
power and a compulsory force
upon rational convic-
tion. The substantive
grounds of the original capacity,
moreover, like the substantive sources of
the subse-
quent titles to power, have varied
markedly with time
and circumstance. The history of the idea,
therefore,
is not the simple course of a single category in response
to external changes of practical conditions and ideo-
logical associations. The history of the idea is
composed
rather of the changing proportions between its own
dominant
meanings and of the changing identities as-
sumed by both these dominant forms. It is a history,
then, in which
the internal relations of the idea reflect
and clarify the variety of its
external roles.
The chameleonic qualities of authority raise the
special problem of locating
it within any historical
complex of ideas. The obvious key to the
recognition
of authority in history is the application of an
analytical
definition in terms of the constant social function of
authority. But the general danger run by this concep-
tual mode of intellectual history—the danger
of
anachronism in the imputation to the past of concepts
relevant to
the present—is confirmed in the case of
authority by its
cumulative shift from one meaning to
another in its overall development. An
analytical defi-
nition of authority in the
current terms of such cate-
gories as
dominion, government, and power must fail
to account for the changing
relationship of these cate-
gories to
authority in the past, and it is precisely this
relationship which is the
primary historical problem
of authority.
To avoid this danger without reverting to the out-
worn philological mode of intellectual history—i.e., the
mechanical recognition of the idea by the word—the
following
method will be used here: since the term
“authority”
is a Latin derivative, the original ideas of
authority will be defined
first by induction from the
kinds of situations which the Romans devised
the term
to meet: these semantically defined ideas, in turn, be-
come the marks of recognition for subsequent
forms
of authority, whatever their nomenclature. This
method, it
should be noted, entails the exclusion of
non-Western and pre-Roman ideas
of authority from
consideration, since the authority which is the
object
of these ideas is a different kind of authority from the
composite object continuously derivative from initial
Roman usage.
Far from the linear development of the voluntary
to the coercible grounds of
obedience which is the
superficial historical scheme of the idea of
authority
in the West, the actual history which emerges from
the blend
of philological and categorical methods re-
veals a spiral process from the ancient Romans to the
present. In
this process the successive centers of cul-
tural innovation provoked successive recurrences of the
original
idea of voluntary authority, to be followed at
each stage by the equally
recurrent attenuation of its
voluntary character under the pull of
antithetical ideas
of liberty and dominion and by the reformulation of
the idea of authority into a rationale of power. There
have been four such
complete stages, each comprising
both a distinct period in Western culture
and a specific
context for the recurrent process of authority. The
Romans devised the idea of authority with special
reference to law and
ended with a legal justification
of sovereignty. Medieval men recapitulated
the same
process for religion, early modern men for politics, and
most
recently modern man for society. These dove-
tailed stages, each constituted by the two successive
basic forms of
authority, make up the general history
of the idea.
