Dictionary of the History of Ideas Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas |
VI. |
V. |
VI. |
I. |
VI. |
V. |
III. |
III. |
VI. |
VI. |
V. |
V. |
III. |
VII. |
VI. |
VI. |
III. |
III. |
II. |
I. |
I. |
I. |
V. |
VII. |
VI. |
V. |
III. |
III. |
III. |
II. |
I. |
I. |
I. |
VI. |
VII. |
III. |
VII. |
VII. |
VII. |
V. |
VI. |
VI. |
VI. |
VI. |
VI. |
VII. |
III. |
IV. |
VI. |
VI. |
VI. |
V. |
V. |
V. |
III. |
III. |
VII. |
III. |
I. |
V. |
V. |
VII. |
VI. |
I. |
I. |
I. |
I. |
VI. |
III. |
IV. |
III. |
IV. |
IV. |
IV. |
VI. |
VI. |
VI. |
V. |
III. |
VI. |
Dictionary of the History of Ideas | ||
II
There is common agreement that the idea of author-
ity, in the full range of meanings that have given it
an integral
intellectual life to the present, had its ori-
gins during the Roman Republic with the coinage of
the distinctive
term, auctoritas, to cover several kinds
of
primarily, albeit not exclusively, legal relationships.
The problem with
the ancient Roman origins of au-
thority,
indeed, is an embarrassment of riches: it is the
problem of inferring a
characteristic and coherent
Roman idea from the welter of literal usages
developed
for the term. The wealth of scholarly inquiries into
the
Roman term and concept has resolved part of this
identified from classifications of the term's myriad
functions (Heinze, pp. 349-55; Fürst, passim; Lütcke,
pp. 13-29). But what the commentators agree on
stresses the importance of what remains problematic.
They agree that the frequency and variety of the
Romans' applications of these ideas to both their pri-
vate and their public life demonstrate the fundamental
importance of authority for the whole of Roman soci-
ety, and they agree too that this importance implies
a cultural coherence among the Roman ideas of au-
thority. But there is no consensus on what this coher-
ence was.
The reason for the disagreement at this level would
seem to be the
insistence upon a rigorous coherence
in the form of a definite hierarchy
among the ideas
of authority or in the form of one definite, integral
idea which logically or semantically comprehends the
rest. But the actual
contexts of the partial ideas of
Roman authority are simply too variegated
and irre-
ducible to bear such a stringent
unity. What was com-
mon to them was not a
synthetic idea to which they
contributed but a general attitude which
underlay
them all. The coherent Roman idea of authority is a
formulation of this attitude. It can be ascertained
through an inquiry into
the pattern formed by the
various partial ideas that went into it and into
the
historical development of this pattern.
Three partial ideas of authority can be inferred from
the types of
application which the Romans made of
the term since remote republican
times.
First, among the earliest traceable meanings shared
by ideas clustered
around the distinctive term,
auc-
toritas
(or the root term, auctor, signifying the
agent
whose identifying capacity was his auctoritas), was the
extra confirmation or guarantee of a transaction
which
was added to its normal legal sanctions by a special
responsibility of one party in the transaction. In the
field of private
law, for example, “the authority of the
trustee”
meant the trustee's confirmation of a ward's
action which made the action
legally binding and the
trustee legally accountable to the ward for all
resulting
injuries. Again, “the authority of the
lord” (auctoritas
domini) meant an
imposition of the lord's will upon
the slave in addition to the lord's
regular right of
coercive command (iussum), and
where the related but
more inclusive “authority of the
patron” spelled out
the legally incremental quality of authority
by specify-
ing it as that which the
paterfamilias exercises in addi-
tion to his
governing power (imperium) over his family
(including slaves) and without governing power over
his clients.
These private-law applications of authority help to
identify an analogous
meaning of political authority
in Roman public life. The most overt link between the
two
fields for this meaning of authority was provided
by the idea of
“patriarchal authority” (auctoritas
patrum), which was permanently associated with
“the
authority of the Senate” (auctoritas Senatus), synony-
mously during the early Republic and as one of its
formal capacities
during the later. Denoting the Sen-
ate's
function, as a council of elders, of approving the
resolutions of the
popular assemblies before they could
become law, the patriarchal authority
of the Senate
was obviously the public analogy of the private au-
thority inherent in the certificatory
function of the
trustee. This aspect of senatorial authority was a
formal
instance of a public authority expressly recognized in
all high
governmental officials as a consequence but
not a derivative of their legal
prerogative or power
(imperium or potestas). It was a prime example of what
we may
call the incremental or tutelary idea of
authority—the idea,
that is, of a kind of control over
men that is additional to regular legal
sanctions and
is itself grounded in fiduciary legal status.
A second, even more pervasive, meaning of author-
ity, diffused as it was through the literature of Roman
private life
as well as of law and politics, was the
imputation of the
personal—especially moral—
qualities of agents,
counsellors, or officials to their
decisions, judgments, and regulations
for the purpose
of extending the trust in these model persons to their
official deeds. This partial idea of authority has been
characterized as
“personality-power” or “prestige-
power” by subsequent
commentators. Where the first,
or incremental, idea of authority was
distinguished
from command and power in order to complement
them, the
second, or personal, idea of authority was
distinguished from counsel and
opinion in order to
complement them.
Scattered profusely through Roman literature in
references taking the
general form of “doing something
by someone's
authority” (ex auctoritate alicuius),
dis-
tinctively personal grounds of
authority were imputed
to propositions, testimony, and arguments. They
ranged
from the advice of any trustworthy individual in his
private
capacity to the private and public recom-
mendations of poets, philosophers, and scholars revered
as seers
or experts—which were mere counsels and
opinions in themselves
but whose source made them
accepted as law and truth, obligating their
recipients
in fact far beyond their formal capacity to bind. Cicero,
whose habit of joining Stoic principles to Roman prac-
tice has made him a veritable source-book for the
personal and
moral genesis of social and political au-
thority, explicitly substantiated this genesis by analyz-
ing it into the qualities of nature—i.e.,
virtue—and of
time—i.e., original talent, wealth,
experience, knowl-
cially imposing and their activities especially influen-
tial upon other people.
In political contexts the Romans also attributed au-
thority to such socially oriented personal qualities as
“honor” (dignitas), or
“influence” (gratia: literally,
the
disposition to make connections and dispense favors),
or
meritorious acts, or old age (auctoritas
maiorum).
The authority attributed to these personal
qualities
often shaded insensibly into the incremental authority
of
public office. In its application to such executive
officials as consuls
and military leaders the preeminence
derivative from personal merits and
the preeminence
derivative from the perquisites and responsibilities
of
the offices themselves were obviously osmotic, and even
in the case
of the Senate the moral prestige of ancestral
families and of noble lineage
merged into the incre-
mental political role
of the council of elders.
But the distinctive features of personal authority—its
continuity
with example and advice and its contrast
to official
power—nonetheless retained their identities
as persistent
ingredients of the characteristic Roman
approach to political authority.
Their most notable
political contributions were to the crucial, related,
and
otherwise undefinable Roman ideas of the authority of
the Senate
and the authority of the princeps.
“The authority of the Senate” grew, during the later
Republic, to be something more than the above-
mentioned incremental patriarchal authority with
which it had
been wholly identified, and the homage
paid to the personal qualities
associated with Senators
participated in this growth. The authority of the
Senate
came now to mean the specially effective consultative
function
which was in fact the elusive mode of gov-
ernment of the Republic's sovereign organ—a function
which, in the memorable phrase of Mommsen's
Römisches Staatsrecht, made auctoritas “more than a
counsel and less
than a command; rather a counsel with
which one could not properly avoid
compliance”
(Mommsen, III, 2, p. 1034). This idea of
authority
covered all the characteristic operations of the Senate,
including both its enactment of final decrees (senatūs
consulta), which had the formal force of
law, and its
recommendation of imperfect resolutions, which did
not
have the formal force of law. Both activities were
subsumed under
counselling, and the Senate's “author-
ity” was attributed to the actual binding force of its
counsels, whatever their form.
Thus Cicero acknowledged “authority,” in this sense
of
factually prescriptive consultation, to be the princi-
ple of the Senate's political preeminence, and he con-
trasted it explicitly with “the
power” (potestas) of the
magistrates and
“the liberty” (libertas) of the
people
in one context or with the “power” and the “sover
eignty” (potestas and majestas) of the people in other
contexts. For
Cicero as for other witnesses, moreover,
much of the prescriptive force
that was imputed to
the “counsels” of the Senate
stemmed from the per-
sonal attributes of
lineage, propertied wealth, and
character associated with the Senators.
Related to senatorial authority but even more defi-
nitely personal in its origins and extralegal in its opera-
tion was the Roman idea of a
“principal authority,”
or auctoritas principis (Magdelain, pp. 1-76). Obviously
of
decisive importance for the transition from republic
to empire during the
period of the “principate,” the
concept of the
authority of the “princeps” (for lack
of a precise
equivalent, the Latin term has been carried
over into English) developed
its characteristic conno-
tations, which
the emperors and their legists would
later use, during republican times. In
its explicit Cice-
ronian version the
princeps is the “ruler of the com-
monwealth” (rector rei
publicae) in a purely ideal sense:
as princeps, he occupies no
official position and pos-
sesses no legal
power, but he actually guides the balanced
constitution of the Roman state
from the outside as
it were, whatever his formal political function, by
dint
of the magnetic moral virtues and merits which made
“the best citizen” (optimus
civis) also “the first, or chief,
citizen”
(princeps). Working preferably—albeit
not
necessarily—upon the Senate, the first citizens's char-
acteristic mode of de facto
government is, like the
Senate's, from personal preeminence and
through
“counsel” (concilium),
a mode of government which
is summed up in its entirety as auctoritas. But unlike
the Senate, which as a
council of elders was a regular
constitutional organ however irregular its
function, the
authority of the princeps not only characterized his
political activity but constituted his very existence.
Hence not only was
authority something “of the first
citizen's”
(auctoritas principis) but someone was a
first
citizen through authority (princeps
auctoritate), and
Cicero's synonymous use of
“honor” in this context as
the constituent property
of the first citizen (princeps
dignitate)
clearly indicate the personal focus of the
princeps' authority during the
republic. It was con-
firmed by the
extraordinary function, also attributed
to the princeps by both Cicero and
Augustus, of sup-
plying “private
counsel” directly to the body politic
(res
publica) for the purpose of “liberating” it
from
the degeneration of its public organs.
The third and final partial idea of authority for the
Romans was the quality
of creation or initiation which
we still primarily associate with the
terms, “author”
and
“authorize.” In its references to general human
relations, this kind of authority denoted the source of
a rumor or of a
doctrine or of a decision, with the
definite implication that the very
identification of this
moral qualities, carried with it grounds for others to
conform voluntarily to what he authorized. And this
in either of two ways. His designation as source (auctor)
implied either his own continuing responsibility for the
information, opinions, and actions in question or the
rightful origin of information, opinions, and action
whose original right had been transferred.
In the first alternative, authority referred to the
special respect that was
due to the accountable origi-
nator (author)
of a complete idea or activity by those
who simply comply with it; in the
second, authority
refers to the originator's (authorizer's) rightful
transfer
of his claim on this special respect to those who comply
with
his original incomplete idea or activity by com-
pleting it. A prominent instance of original authority
in the
first sense was the inclusion of the proposal of
law within the function of
an official's “authority,” as
shown by the synonymous
use, in this context, of auctor
legis and
lator legis (Berger, pp. 368-69). The
most
far-reaching applications of original authority in the
second
sense were obviously to political power. This
kind of authority, for
example, was central to the
princeps' function—over and above
his personal or
private counselling functions—of public
counselling on
critical issues. Not only was he himself “the
leader”
(dux) of the state solely by
virtue of his “authority”
as the initiator (auctor) of proposals—a respect for
initiative entirely comprehensible in the normal stasis
of a balanced
republican constitution—but the regular
public organs which
enacted his counsel into legislation
acted as much by the transferred
authority which they
acquired along with his counsel as by the
coercive
power of their own offices.
The Romans themselves never either reduced or
synthesized their three
categorical ideas of authority—
the incremental, the personal,
and the initiatory—in
a single coherent concept, although
subsequent com-
mentators have not been
wanting who have tried, on
etymological or logical grounds, to do it for
them. It
is generally agreed that the etymological root of
Roman
“authority” (auctoritas) is
“augment” (augere),
and Cicero
did occasionally identify auctoritas with
a function
of “increasing” honor or the general welfare.
But
however close to the incremental idea this verbal
root may be, the lack of
a direct etymological connec-
tion between
this root and other, very different mean-
ings
of the word—such as authorship, from auctor—
which are appropriate to the other partial ideas
of
authority has led to a simple repetition of the intellec-
tual problem on the etymological level. Hence
there
is general disagreement on the relevance of the ety-
mology to the concept of authority (Heinze, p. 352;
Lütcke, p. 23).
Conceptually, moreover, both in their relationships
with the idea of
“power” and in their relationships with
the idea of
“reason” the partial ideas of authority
showed
themselves to be not merely heterogeneous but
mutually opposed. In their
relationships to “power”
the respective ideas of
authority were sometimes ex-
plicitly defined
in contradistinction from it and some-
times
explicitly asserted as the basis of it. In their
relationships to
“reason” the ideas of authority were
sometimes
implicitly tied to it (as in the authority
associated with counselling),
sometimes made explicitly
compatible with it as a kind of shorthand for an
alter-
nate path to the same truth (e.g.,
Cicero's acceptance
of the “authority” of the Greek
philosophers when they
do not “deliver their reasons”
[rationem redderent]),
sometimes
explicitly opposed to it—and when opposed
to reason authority
was deemed sometimes an option
to be preferred and sometimes an option to
be rejected.
These variations in the external relations of the various
partial ideas of authority highlight the difficulty of
arriving at a
generic Roman idea of authority by either
a semantical or logical analysis
of its parts.
But it is possible to arrive at such a generic idea
by a historical
analysis, which aligns variations along
a temporal axis and demonstrates
them as coherent
stages of an idea in the process of change. Roman
public law—always, as we have seen, a crossroads for
the sundry
partial ideas of authority—furnished the
context for the
historical passage from republic to
empire which makes the integration of
the various
forms of authority a matter not so much of histori-
ographical interpretation as of
historical fact. The
crucial document in the reconstruction of this
history
is undoubtedly the famous Chapter 34 of Augustus' Res
gestae, into whose formulation of authority
republican
ideas flowed and from whose formulation the pattern
of the
imperial idea emerged. Describing the position
which was his after 27 B.C.,
when the Senate conferred
upon him the title of “Augustus, for
my reward,” in
gratitude for his formal reestablishment of the
republic,
the consul Octavius delivered the most revealing pro-
nouncement in the whole history of the
idea of author-
ity: “After this
time,” he wrote, “I was superior to all
by my
authority (auctoritate omnibus praestiti), but
I
had no more power (potestatis... nihilo
amplius) than
the others who were also colleagues in the
magistracy”
(Magdelain, pp. vii, 53). The appeal to the
typical
republican idea of a personal and unofficial authority,
categorically distinct from official power, seems obvi-
ous enough, but what is equally significant, albeit more
covert,
was the new constitutional role which its asso-
ciation here with the title “Augustus”
symbolized for
this authority.
The implicit link in this association was the function
Octavian's republican reference to his personal moral
preeminence and with his definition of his official title
in the initiatory sense of the princeps' authority as “the
author of the best condition of state,” i.e., auctor optimi
status (ibid., pp. 56-62). Through its connection with
the extralegal republican ideas of authority on the one
hand and with the legal title of “Augustus” on the
other, the Augustan principate initiated, under per-
sonal auspices, the process which would be completed,
under institutional auspices, in the later Empire: the
compression of loose-jointed authority, in response to
the needs of official political organs, into a compact
legal basis of constitutional power.
In Augustus' hands, indeed, the various strands of
the princeps' authority
were unified while the discrete
powers of his sundry other
offices—each was granted
in a different senatorial decree, at a
different time, and
for a different period from the others—were
deliber-
ately kept separate, with the
result that authority be-
came recognized as the
unitary basis of the several
formal powers in the Empire. Augustus achieved
this
status for his authority by explicitly asserting both his
princeps' authority and his magisterial power as official
capacities and by
implicitly blending the various
meanings of authority into a single
principal idea of
it in the service of its political function. He
combined
in himself and secured legal sanction for both kinds
of
authority associated with the two traditions of the
princeps (the
initiatory public counsellor of the Senate
and the personally revered
private counsellor of the
people). He merged these, moreover, in a new
third
type of princeps' authority—a guardian authority as
trustee of the commonwealth (custos, or pater patriae),
officially charged by the Senate with the
safekeeping
of the whole community (cura et tutela rei
publicae).
Although still without coercive power itself, this
au-
thority both partook of and
contributed to the legal
obligation of the statutes through the continuous
per-
sonal identity and overall controlling
function of
Augustus as both the official bearer of the authority
which attracted obedience and the official magistrate
with the power to
compel it.
With the development of the Augustan empire from
a covert to an overt
absolutism, the uneasy personal
balance between authority and power in
Augustus was
resolved into a definite legal and logical connection
in
his successors. The legal texts and commentaries
from the second century
A.D. onward, abound in refer-
ences to
“our authority” and to “the authority of
the
laws” as the valid source of particular statutes. They
are applied, moreover, not only to “our” authority in
the traditional sense of “the authority of the
princeps”
(principalis auctoritas)
and to the “authority of the
resolutions” (constitutionum
auctoritas) which were his
characteristic mode of
recommendation, but also to
“our” authority in the
novel sense of “imperial” and
“sovereign
authority” (imperialis auctoritas and
auc-
toritas nostrae
majestatis) and to the “authority” of
the
regular coercive laws of the sovereign power (auc-
toritas juris and auctoritas legum).
The official context and the juristic commentaries
make it clear that these
references to both a principal
consultative and a governmental coercive
agency of
authority were not, as in republican times, references
to
two different kinds of authority, but rather to one
continuous function of
authority. This function was
part of the legal and political process which
merged
the offices of princeps and Imperator and gave to the
“resolutions” (constitutiones) of
the princeps the formal
coercive “force of the law”
(vigorem legis) which was
the Emperor's
by virtue of the people's delegation of
their sovereignty to him.
With the juncture of deliberative authority and
magisterial power in the
legislative sovereignty of the
princeps-Emperor, the varied ancestral,
moral, and
initiatory grounds of traditional Roman authority con-
verged into a single epitomal quality of
the laws them-
selves, conveying the sense of
an obligation to obey
them beyond the application of either adequate
reason
or adequate compulsion. Hence the Imperial jurist,
Ulpian
(third century A.D.), revealed the political func-
tion as well as the legal destination of the Roman idea
of
authority when he declared the decrees, edicts, and
judgments of the
“emperor” (imperator) to be
“stat-
utes” (leges) which were “popularly” (vulgo) called
“resolutions”
(constitutiones) of the princeps.
The historical development of the Roman attitude
to authority demonstrates
an essential attribute of the
general idea which reappears in every stage
of its
history and runs through its history in the large: the
instability—stemming from the elusiveness of its origi-
nal fragmented meaning—which made its
proponents
susceptible to the attraction of settled political power.
But the Roman development also reveals, within the
original fragmented idea
of authority, the potential
coherence which was actualized by the magnetic
re-
quirements of political power and
can be traced
through its response to them.
Both the terminological persistence of “princeps” as
an Imperial title and of “consider,”
“assess,” “resolve”
(arbitror, censeo, placet) to define the activity of
the
princeps, and the formal logical priority which “au-
thority” as the source of law and
over the “power”
which specified and executed it,
were traces of the
idea's original meanings which lasted through the
Empire as compatible supports of the Emperor's sov-
ereignty, and furnish clues to their common meaning.
chose final human depositories for their trust, and the
various principles on which the choice was made be-
came mutually reinforcing when they were aligned in
a series directed toward the crucial problem of estab-
lishing a basis for government beyond the specific
punishments its organs could impose, and the specific
benefits they could deliver. In this constitutional con-
text the personal basis of authority was conceived in
terms of a civic morality; the creative basis of authority
was conceived in terms of a political initiative; and
the commitment of both to validating the origins of
political power served to reinforce the trust reposed
in the legal guardian who added his responsibility for
its results. Thus both of the main discrepancies in the
various meanings of authority—the discrepancy be-
tween the personal grounds and public effects of moral
authority and the discrepancy between the initiatory
and confirmatory grounds of responsible authority (that
is, between the rights of authorship and the duties of
augmentation)—were resolved into sequential relations
when they were spread out along a legal axis to supply
the organs of government with a single principle of
origins and of guaranteed results that was more vener-
able and more unified than the combination of political
appointment, physical sanctions, and promised welfare
associated with official power.
This political integration of authority made manifest
the three common
traits which had always underlain
the original variety of its overt
principles. First, au-
thority was essentially
fiduciary: where the correlative
of reason was conviction and the
correlative of power
was obedience, the correlative of authority was
trust.
Secondly, authority was essentially transitional: its
function
was to bring principles from a higher realm
of being to bear upon the
activities in a lower realm
of being: ideas of authority modulated the
principles
so as to make them relevant without divesting them
of their
superiority. Thirdly, authority was essentially
hierarchical: where power
and liberty could both be
located anywhere and exercised in any direction,
men
who used the idea of authority distinctively assumed
that the
superiority of the realm of its origin over the
realm of its exercise
required a parallel hierarchy
within the realm of its exercise; only higher
principles
which were selective in their application were author-
itative principles; those who
appropriated them were
the superiors, and those who recognized them
were
the subordinates.
Thus two generic ideas of authority emerged from
the Roman experience: an
actual idea which was a
quality of sovereign power and a potential idea,
inde-
pendent of the idea of power,
which persisted under
the cover of the legal actuality. With the actualization
of the coherent idea of autonomous authority under
new auspices
at the start of the next era, the overt
relations of the two ideas came to
constitute the intel-
lectual history of
authority.
Dictionary of the History of Ideas | ||