Dictionary of the History of Ideas Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas |
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![]() | Dictionary of the History of Ideas | ![]() |
AUTHORITY
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.
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.
III
Overlapping the later Roman Empire, absorbing the
forms of its culture while
assisting at its demise, the
Christian Church perpetuated Roman ideas of
author-
ity along with the Latin terms for
them. But the
Churchmen introduced these ideas into new situations
and
used them in new contexts which both changed
the substance and reinforced
the pattern of relations
already established between the autonomous and
the
hybrid ideas of authority. Starting from the reformula-
tion of Roman concepts under the theological
and
ecclesiastical auspices of the Latin Church Fathers and
running
through the Protestant and Catholic Reforma-
tions of the sixteenth century, the idea of authority
was
revitalized by the special affinity of Christian
religiosity for it.
Association with an intellectually and
institutionally autonomous
Christianity restored the
independence of the original pure idea of
authority
and made the Church, both in its internal and external
relations, the main arena in the medieval history of
the idea.
The new authority in the Christian dispensation was
attributed to God's
revealed truth. Its pervasive impact
stemmed from the combination of its
acknowledged
supremacy over all other kinds of authority with its
continuous relevance to all forms of temporal life in
general and to
temporal government and power in
particular. The initial effect of this new
Christian di-
mension of authority upon the
Roman traditions of
authority which it absorbed was to loosen the
Imperial
combination of authority with temporal political
power by
intruding a source of authority independent
of political power.
Subsequently, the theologians and
the canonists re-knit the bonds between
authority and
political power to include the originally autonomous
authority of religion in a hierarchical system of official
Christian
authorities.
The three main steps in this medieval process of
successive disruption and
re-integration which would
become paradigmatic for every new stage in the
history
of the idea of authority were: the development of
Revelation
into a Christian authority sui generis; the
primary interaction of Christian religion and ecclesias-
tical politics in the constitution of the Catholic
Church;
the conclusive interaction of religion, Church, and
temporal
government in the organization of the uni-
versal Christian community. Each step contributed an
analytically
distinct source of the idea and, despite the
overlap among them, these
religious, doctrinal, and insti-
successive chronological emphases within the Christian
era. The Reformations of the sixteenth century, in this
schema, can be viewed as so many attempted restora-
tions of the initial, purely religious idea of authority
which developed, under the pervasive late-medieval
conditions of religio-secular interpenetration, into
conflicting versions of institutional authority.
1. Religious Authority.
The idea of a transcendent
and ultimate depository of human trust,
not dependent
in principle on earthly offices, took several compatible
forms in early Christian disquisitions.
First, the idea of “divine authority,” stipulated by
Augustine (in his De ordine) as the
“supreme” (summa)
authority,
juxtaposed notions of authority grounded on
origination (God as author or
cause of his creation),
on metaphysical hierarchy (God as the worker of
mira-
cles for the limited human capacity
of comprehension),
and on responsible power (God as both infinite
power
[potestas] over men and as infinite mercy [clementia]
for men). Second, the idea of
“Christ's authority”
(auctoritas
Christi) juxtaposed the notion of authoriza-
tion (delegation of the Creator's authority to the
medi-
ator), the anthropological belief in
family hierarchy
(the derivation of the authority of the Son from the
authority of the Father), the appeal of personal influ-
ence (the person of Christ as authoritative
“example”),
and the commitment to an ultimate source
(Christ as
“author of the Gospel”). Third, the idea
of “Scriptural
authority” (auctoritas divinae scripturae) juxtaposed
the notion of
authorization (the Bible as the Word of
God, embodying “the
authority of God”) with the
incremental respect due the
guarantor (the Bible as
“apostolic
authority”—that is, the testimony of apos-
tolic witnesses who confirmed the truth of the
Gospel
for future generations of believers). Fourth, the idea
of
patristic authority (auctoritas patrum or auctoritas
sanctorum) juxtaposed the notion of
authorization (the
inspiration of the Fathers by Holy Scripture), the
notion of persuasion apart from or prior to rational
demonstration, the
notion of personal expertise in the
juristic formulation of a canonical
faith, and the
anthropological reverence for the elders (auctoritas
maiorum as the respect due the fathers
of a Christian
doctrinal tradition). The idea of church authority
(auctoritas ecclesiae), finally, juxtaposed
ideas of au-
thorized power (the delegation
of “divine authority”
to the Church by Christ), of
unbroken binding tradition
(the authority of the Church as the transmitter
of the
authoritative “tradition of the elders”), of
universal
persuasion (the real meaning of Augustine's famous
declaration in his anti-Manichaean Contra epistolam
quam vocant fundamenti that “I would not believe
the Gospel if the authority of the Catholic Church did
not impel me to it”), and of confirmation (the role
of
the Church in reinforcing Scriptural faith).
Despite the linkage of “authority” and
“power”
which Christianity carried over into
theological ideas
of the Divinity and which led medieval men to use
the terms interchangeably in many contexts, the addi-
tion of the specifically Christian dimension to the idea
of
authority endowed it with a renewed independence
in its relations with the
idea of power. The authority
in the authority-power syndrome referred
always to
the higher, otherworldly source of the force being
exercised, whereas power referred to the source of the
force within the
realm of its exercise. If the easy con-
vertibility of authority and power testified to the inter-
penetration of spiritual and
natural realms in the Mid-
dle Ages, the
spiritual explosions in the name of
authority both at the beginning and the
end of that
period testified to the countervailing effort to keep a
realm of superior being at once apart from and influ-
ential upon the powers of this world.
This general contribution of Christianity, as a reli-
gion, to the idea of authority—its combination of
transcendence and immanence to provide a platform
outside this world for
the agencies which could bind
men within this world—had its
model in the specific
contribution of Augustine. He traced the
ultimate
source of authority over men to the person of Christ:
it was
through His “authority” that the power of God
was
modulated into the power of the Church and it
was the relationship of His
divine to His human nature,
at once distinct and effluent, that epitomized
all Chris-
tian authority, at once
transcendent and effective.
2. Doctrinal Authority.
Between the early appli-
cations of
Roman legal concepts to the Christian State
Church in the fourth century
A.D. and the church-state
polemics of the late thirteenth, Christian ideas
of au-
thority developed primarily under the
impetus given
by the internal organization of the Catholic Church.
Of
the two organizational levels—the doctrinal and the
constitutional—it was the former that proved to be
the more
provocative of distinctively Christian ideas
of authority.
The articulation of a Catholic doctrine shaped ideas
of authority by
defining them vis-à-vis the ideas of
tradition on the one side and
of reason on the other.
As the set of religious practices and beliefs
hallowed
by long usage and predicated upon the universal con-
sensus of the faithful over the
generations, tradition
took its place during the early Middle Ages
alongside
Scripture, official administrative position, and canon
law
as separate, frequently competing, subheadings of
authority. This position
was eroded away by the
growth of papal power and the consolidation of
a
hierarchical official order within the Church, until by
tury the idea of tradition as an explicit kind of authority
had all but disappeared. It was subordinated to papal
discretion, absorbed into official canonical jurispru-
dence, or, alternatively, distilled into constitutional
doctrines of conciliar authority (Morrison, pp. 33,
345-46, 354-55). Among the sources of doctrinal au-
thority, tradition clearly represented what was most
distinctive in the original idea of uncoercive authority.
The historical process which made the definition of it
a function of the claimants to official authoritative
power in the Church reflected the process of unification
and subjection undergone by the idea itself.
The shifting theological relationship of authority and
reason shows,
mutatis mutandis, a similar tendency
toward the collapsing of authority's distinctive flexibil-
ity. The history of this relationship is tortuous,
for it
assumed a different shape with each medieval theolo-
gian of consequence and, indeed, along with the
issue
of reason and faith, was a prime topic for the articula-
tion of doctrinal conflicts. As in
the case of the relations
between authority and tradition, the changing
course
of the relations between authority and reason postu-
lated a change in the predominant idea of authority
as such.
In its early medieval phase the emphasis was on its
spiritual source, its
personal incidence, its originative
function, and its practical
effectiveness: it was the
active counterpart of faith; it was faith
translated into
a rule for living in this world, compatible with the
faculty of reason, to which it furnished first principles.
In its middle
phase authority became a bridging prin-
ciple,
one of the crucial concepts which lent verisimil-
itude to the scholastic syntheses of
transcendental
Christianity and Aristotelian naturalism by represent-
ing each overlap of faith and
reason as an identifiable
principle. The idea of authority could have this
func-
tion because of its inherited
spectrum of meanings,
ranging from the claims of spirit to the demands
of
power. In a figure like Aquinas Scripture and Aristotle
were
dovetailed as “authorities,” and the idea of au-
thority itself could be used both for
“the principle of
origins... in divine matters” and
for the agency of
“coercive force” in
“public” affairs (ed. Deferrari, pp.
96-97). The
effect of the idea in its synthetic employ-
ment was to provide an ontological backing for the
dominion of some
men over others: thus Aquinas could
assert authority to be the natural
relationship of supe-
rior to inferior in any
society of men, whether pre-
lapsarian or
postlapsarian, on the principle that
through their guidance and direction
the superiors
were the causes or authors of the actions of their
inferiors. In its late medieval phase the idea of author-
ity, which was disjoined from reason along with the
disjunction of faith and reason, tended itself increas-
ingly to become a quality of will
and power. Duns
Scotus merged the worship due God for his authority
as
“author” or “cause” of life with
that due God for
his “omnipotence” (Scotus, VIII,
816-17). When John
of Paris distinguished between direction and
dominion
as modes of control, he assigned the label
“authority”
(modum
auctoritatis) to dominion (ed. Alan Gewirth,
pp. xlix-1). Ockham
finally epitomized the subjugation
of authority as a distinctive concept by
denying it any
role as intermediary between faith and reason. The
disjunction between the realms of faith and reason
entailed, in this view, the primacy of the power of
will and of the
principle of individuation within each
realm. In
matters of faith, authority was subordinated
to the power of the Holy
Spirit over individual con-
science. In
matters of reason the authority both of logic
and the moral law was
subordinate to individual exist-
ences and
prescriptions created directly by divine
omnipotence.
3. Institutional Authority.
The early institutionally
conditioned idea of authority found its
archetypal ex-
pression in the fifth-century
formula of Pope Gelasius
I on the twofold government of the world:
“the sacred
authority of the popes (auctoritas sacrata pontificum)
and the power of kings
(potestas regalis), with the
former the
greater of the two by virtue of the account
which the popes must render of
the kings themselves
to God” (Ullmann, p. 23). Authority in this
distinctive
phase had four characteristic connotations. First, it was
spiritual in the double sense that it was the direction
of men toward the
salvation of their souls and that
its agency was separate from the agency
of coercive
force. Second, it was unified in the double sense that
only a unified guidance could lead to man's single final
end—i.e., salvation—and that it was indivisible, in con-
trast to power, which could be divided.
Third, it
was superior, in the sense that it prescribed what was
executed by the wielders of power. Finally, authority
was literally
transitional in the sense that it was the
transfer into the temporal world
of what was power
in the spiritual world.
In its internal ecclesiastical applications, conse-
quently, there was from the start the tendency toward
a
terminological confusion of auctoritas and potestas,
since the inherited distinction between
the capacity
to evoke assent and the right to command obedience
was
blurred in its application to the “principate of the
Roman
Church,” conceived to be a realm of spirit
innocent of physical
coercion but yet ordained with
a spiritual “power of the
keys.” “Plenary authority”
and
“plenary power,” for example, were used inter-
changeably to characterize the
administrative mandate
conferred on popes and bishops by election (Tierney,
to the thirteenth century the ideas of authority and
power tended to merge in their application within the
Roman Church but, as the persistence of the Gelasian
formula indicates, they retained their distinctive
meanings in their application to the relations between
the organized Church and the Christian society as a
whole. The net result was an attitude toward authority
which equipped its bearers with the power of ecclesi-
astical coercion in spiritual matters and with the influ-
ence to guide action in temporal matters.
But from the thirteenth century conditions both
within the Roman Church
(heretical and conciliar
movements) and outside it (conflict with the
temporal
powers) converged with the revival of classical modes
of
thinking to produce a notable change in the medie-
val idea of authority. The change tended to blend the
meanings of
the idea in the spiritual and temporal
realms of the Christian society, and
to produce a sim-
plified notion of authority
as the basis of coercive
power. Because spiritual authority within the
Church
became disunited and disputed during this period,
Papalists and
Conciliarists alike resolved the ecclesias-
tical ambiguity of authority and power in favor of the
more
manageable idea of power, with the idea of
authority adduced simply to add
the connotation of
rightful origin to the rightful title already inherent
in
the idea of power. This idea of authoritative spiritual
power
within the Roman Church had its analogue in
the relations between the
emerging separate institu-
tions of church
and state, for whether in the Papalist's
form of the Pope's
“authority” in temporal affairs or
the Conciliarist
acknowledgment of the temporal
ruler's independent
“authority” over the externals of
ecclesiastical
organization, the idea of authority in
church-state relations too became
inseparable from
coercive dominion.
The Papalist version of the late medieval idea of
authority was the more
explicit. The Papalist writers
came to rely increasingly upon the doctrine
of the
“plenitude of power,” redefined during the
thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries so that it no longer signified
the
circumscribed papal and episcopal “plenary au-
thority” within the Church, but now referred to
the
Pope's exclusive and unlimited sovereignty, derived
from Christ
through Saint Peter and applicable to
spiritual and temporal matters alike.
Within the
Church this doctrine was accompanied by the emphasis
on
“the power of jurisdiction”—i.e., the
governmental
power over the Church transmitted from Christ to the
Pope
alone—and on the subordination of the “sacra-
mental power” bequeathed by
Christ to all priests
(Wilks, pp. 375-77). Outside the Church, the
Pope's
plenitude of jurisdictional power was called “author
ity” no longer, as in the Gelasian formula, to charac-
terize a mere spiritual superiority
over the power of
temporal rulers but to denote the “supreme
temporal
power” itself, as it was possessed in its integrity
by
the Pope before he delegated it to be exercised by
secular rulers
under his direction. Papal authority, in
short, was the form taken by the
Pope's spiritual power
in the temporal arena.
Against this papal offensive, the intellectual defend-
ers of the secular rulers sought in the main to make
a cogent
doctrine out of the traditional pluralism in
the medieval attitude toward
authority. This they did
by streamlining the functional multiplicity of the
sev-
eral ordained authorities into a dual
track of ecclesias-
tical authority in
the realm of spirit and an Imperial
or royal authority in the temporal
realm, with this
“regal authority” equivalent in
function and superior
in power to pontifical authority. Only the
Conciliar
writers, engaging the Papalists all along the extended
and
wavering line between the spiritual and temporal
realms, developed a mirror
image of the Papalist idea
of authority and carried even further the idea
of au-
thority as the absolute spiritual
ground of political
power. Where the Papalists used the ambiguous mean-
ing of the “church”
(ecclesia) to include within its
spiritual power
a spiritual aspect of the temporal
realm, the Conciliarists used the
ambiguous meaning
of the “state” (civitas or regnum) to include a temporal
aspect of the spiritual realm. Moreover, when the
Conciliarists argued
Christ's direct authorization of “a
general council composed of
all Christians or of the
weightier part of them” as the
“principal authority”
in the Church and carried it
over by implied analogy
to “the whole body of citizens, or the
weightier part
thereof” as the “primary
authority” in the state
(Marsilius, pp. 45, 280), they placed a
Christian im-
primatur on the pyramidal model
of political authority,
operating through representation, to counter
the
Papalist legacy of the hieratic model of authority,
operating
through delegation.
Reformations of the sixteenth century initiated
nothing essentially new in
the principle of authority,
but they did mark the denouement of its
medieval
stage. The Protestant reformers sealed off further de-
velopment of the Christian idea of
authority by merely
recapitulating its medieval development. But while
they did not significantly change the idea, they did
significantly change
the conditions to which the idea
applied, and they contributed thereby to
the change
of the idea under other auspices. Whether Luther's
break
with the Roman Church is explained in terms
of religious individualism,
arrogant disobedience, or the
revolt of the son against the father, it is
clear that what
he wanted was the institution of different authorities
it is clear too that the main-line Protestant reformers—
Zwingli and Calvin—followed him in this. To all three,
the Word of God was the supreme objective authority
for all individuals; this authority took a form external
to individuals, since it was manifest in Scripture, an
externality epitomized by radicals' reference to the
main-liners' Scripture as the “paper Pope.”
For the determination of right doctrine and the
correct administration of
essential sacraments, Scrip-
tural authority
was vested in community churches, and
the individual's submission to their
transmitted author-
ity thus became necessary
to salvation. Submission to
the temporal authorities was prescribed,
finally, for all
occasions save the most flagrant political violation
of
God's Word, on the grounds of the divine ordination
of the temporal
hierarchy to make possible the un-
trammelled spiritual operation of the true Church
(Davies, passim).
This generic position of the main
Protestant church-fathers shows even
their original
conception of their mission to have been not the over-
throw of ecclesiastical authority in the
name of reli-
gious liberty but the reversion
to the early spiritual
type of religious authority against the late
medieval
tendency to make the ideas of authority and power
overlap.
And yet the Protestant churches of the Reformation
developed precisely in
the same direction as the Cath-
olic Church
which they attacked. Whether in the form
of theocracies or of state
churches, ecclesiastical au-
thority and
political power tended increasingly to
merge in Lutheranism, Zwinglianism,
Calvinism. The
sectarian movements of the radical Reformation re-
sisted the merger precisely as the heretical
movements
of the later Middle Ages had resisted the merger of
authority and power in the Roman Church, and even
more strongly in the
Protestant than in the Catholic
case, the radical sects carried their
despair of official
authoritative churches to the point of condemning
authority along with power in all matters of religion.
They called instead
upon the immediacy of the Holy
Spirit in individuals to replace the
authority of tradi-
tion, community, and
Scripture itself in the mediation
of salvation. And when the Protestant
churches—
notably the Calvinist—did devise a doctrine
of resist-
ance to authority in the name of
religious liberty during
the latter part of the sixteenth century, it was
given
the same label (monarchomach) and it took the same
form as the
concurrent Catholic doctrine of resistance
to Protestant
authority—a form that meant not a new
development away from the
idea of ecclesiastical
authoritative power but only a denial of it to the
wrong
Church. The problem of authority versus liberty in the
determination of ultimate religious truth would, to be
sure, develop into a perennial and provocative concern
of
Protestant theology, but it did so only in tandem
with the more general
confrontation which had its
main focus in a secular sphere.
The competition of analogous Protestant and Cath-
olic doctrines of authoritative power marked the outer
limit of
creative religious authority. The situation of
several ecclesiastical
authorities striving for the mo-
nopolistic
direction of coercive power was obviously
untenable. Since the idea of
authority had come to
provide a necessary higher unity for the
collective
thought and action of human communities, a more
unified
authority than the competing claims to divine
ordination could afford
became an urgent intellectual
and practical necessity. The resulting shift
in the locus
of authority, from transcendent religion to natural
politics, and the concomitant revival of its autonomous
function, was part
of the new mentality which intro-
duced the
modern period of Western history.
IV
The third period in the history of the idea of author-
ity comprised the era from the late sixteenth to the
late
nineteenth centuries, the era in which the realm
of politics became its
central arena and the contiguous
realm of nature was consistently invoked
as its source.
The older hybrid traditions of authority as the titles
of one or another power-wielding hierarchy—family,
church,
aristocracy—persisted in the new era, but
political authority
now overshadowed them, paradox-
ically as
the one kind of authority that underwent
change by being distinguished in
principle from the
power it exercised. It was also the one idea of
authority
that was to have a continuous history in the period,
hardening gradually into an attitude which subjected
political authority
once more to the idea of power.
But if this rigidification of the idea of
political authority
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a fa-
miliar process, there was one development of
authority
in its political period which was entirely unprece-
dented: a liberal response to
politicized authority arose
which for the first time accepted the necessity
of power
to authority, conceived human freedom as the anti-
thesis of rather than an assumption for
the exercise
of authority, and rejected the very principle of author-
ity as a dominant value of the human
community. The
categorical character of this break in the development
of the idea makes it advisable to distinguish the early-
modern from the modern phase of political authority.
1. The Early-Modern Idea of Political Authority.
The pioneering political theorists of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries detached human nature from its
upper linkages to the
sources of divine, moral, and
ancestral authority and retained its lower
linkage with
ment was the conflict among the religious, ethical, and
familial principles of authority which vitiated their
crucial function of providing an unquestioned unified
basis of social organization, and the result was to con-
nect nature with politics as the rationally necessary
source of the social unity that states were achieving
in practice. Authority was now conceived to be the
voluntary creation of natural individuals for the ex-
pressly political function of providing the coercive
power of governments with an origin and a purpose
which transcended this power but was directly relevant
to it.
The idea of authority thus became the characteristic
principle connecting
natural with political man; the
orbit of authority became an outermost ring
of politics.
The establishment of this uncoercive sphere within an
expanded realm of politics meant more than the formal
dislocation of
authority from the acknowledged supe-
riority of higher over lower realms in the human hier-
archy to the acknowledged superiority of the final
over
the instrumental orbits of the same realm. The shift
also brought
with it a substantive alteration in the
grounds of authority: whereas the
older mediation had
stressed the origins of the authority as the
primary
ground of its validity, the newer stressed the insepara-
bility of the origins of the
authority and the ends for
which it was originated.
One of the consequences of this change, obviously,
was to prepare the way
theoretically for the modern
emphasis on the attainment of ends as the
dominant
criterion of the validity of authority. But a more im-
mediate consequence was the paradoxical
authoritari-
anism of the
early-modern phase whereby the political
authority produced by the joint
decision of roughly
equal individuals was deemed by those individuals
to
be more irresistible than had been the traditional au-
thorities who were part of the fundamental
structure
of the universe. The obvious reason for the in-
tensification of a political authority
theoretically
grounded in the free consent of its constituent subjects
was the voluntary factor originally built into it, but
more important for
the irreversibility of this authority
was the stipulation of social unity
as a final end for
this authority which transcended any particular exer-
cise or abuse of its coercive powers.
Integral as this distinctive idea of political authority
proved to be, its
formulation was the gradual product
of the various emphases brought to bear
by different
early-modern theorists on the several aspects of the
process. Machiavelli, for example, suspect and misun-
derstood as his apparent focus on naked power may
have been, did contribute the detachment of the au-
thority of divine providence, Christian morality, and
“ancestral usages” from politics. However
ambiguous
his position on the ends of politics was, moreover, his
distinction between the insecurity of de facto princely
power, on the one
hand, and the pre-coercive authority
of the people who empower their
elected officials or
the uncoercive authority of the
“legislator” who estab-
lishes the principles of government and then divests
himself of
its power, on the other, adumbrated the
differential origins of political
power and authority as
such.
Jean Bodin, in turn, was ambiguous on the origins
of political authority,
attributing it alternately to the
free choice of family-heads and
“to all those who have
recognized power to command
another,” but he con-
tributed to
the conversion of old antitheses between
political and suprapolitical goals
into a hierarchy of
instrumental and final ends, appropriate to the
exercise
of political power and authority, respectively. From
the
point of view of power—i.e.,
“necessity”—the
material activities of the
state have priority, followed
by its moral activities and its intellectual
activities in
that order. From the point of view of the state's au-
thority—i.e.,
“dignity”—the priorities are precisely
reversed (Bodin, pp. 5-18).
For the combination of these factors making for an
independent idea of
political authority—that is, for the
combination of natural
origins prior to the exercise of
power with the final ends exceeding the
exercise of
power—we must look to Hobbes. Positing a
natural
equality of human capacities, wants, and necessities
which
abolished the natural and moral hierarchies
behind traditional authority
and positing too an idea
of power as a natural force which “no
man can transfer
... in a natural manner,” Hobbes developed an
explicit
definition of political authority which was both consis-
tent with the presumption of
extra-political equality
and indispensable to the establishment of a
distinctively
political—that is, of
transferred—power. Hobbes de-
fined
authority literally and exclusively in terms of
authorization—that is, as the “right of doing any
act”
which is commissioned by an “author,”
who has the
original right, to a “representative,”
whose actions in
this commission continue to be
“owned” by the original
author and are thus
“done by Authority” (Hobbes, pp.
83-85). This general
definition of authority, moreover,
was obviously preliminary to the
political definition
of the sovereign as the “common
representer,” “one
person, of whose acts a great
multitude, by mutual
covenants one with another, have made themselves
every one the author, to the end he may use the
strength and means of them
all... ” (pp. 87, 89). The
authorities of individual men are
thereby unified into
the one authority of the sovereign, since each
member
of the multitude avows himself in advance to be “the
the sovereign. It is thus through the medium of author-
ity that “power and strength” are conveyed to and
legitimated in the sovereign.
This function of political authority in Hobbes and
his followers was
obviously an attempt to re-think the
origins of temporal government so as to root it in
the
new atomized and unhierarchical conception of reality:
political
authority in this sense was the concept which
represented the conversion of
ultimate individual wills
into the support of a single collective power.
But the
function of political authority here was also crucially
related to the ends of temporal government. Ostensi-
bly, the end of the state in Hobbes is
simple: “peace
and common defence” (ibid., p. 90).
Actually, however,
this formula masks an apparent dilemma between the
prudential versus the moral character of this end and
of the obligations
prescribed by it. On the one hand,
the sovereign power to achieve the
common peace and
defence is the product of a positive calculation by
which individuals “confer” their natural power, in
exchange for the benefit of security; the obverse is the
negative
calculation whereby each individual limits his
natural power over things in
consideration of an
equally tangible “fear of
punishment” by the sovereign
power. But, on the other hand,
Hobbes also insisted
that when individuals “confer”
their natural power
they do more than merely exchange it for visible bene-
fits or limit it in view of visible
punishments. The
conferment of individual powers upon a sovereign
power creates a moral obligation of obedience over
and above any finite
calculation of benefits because the
subject has
“authorized” every action of the sovereign
in advance
and because the subject is bound by his
own
“intention” in instituting government. Both
grounds
refer to a source of obligation which tran-
scends the public power—that is, to political authority.
The expansibility of the state by the dimension of
its authority so clearly
implied in the curious flexibility
of the rigorous Hobbes, was precisely
stated by his
follower, Samuel Pufendorf, in his correlative concepts
of the ruler's “imperfect rights” and the subject's
“im-
perfect
obligations” (Pufendorf, II, 289). These rights
and obligations
referred to rulers' prescriptions and
citizens' compliance which were both
valid and unen-
forceable. Here, exactly,
was the operational increment
added by political authority to political
power.
2. The Modern Idea of Political Authority.
The
early-modern consensus on political authority as the
valid
authorization of political power developed into
two opposing attitudes
toward authority. A liberal
attitude, by and large predominant
henceforward,
made authority an aspect of political power and re-
duced it to the status of a necessary evil, inevitably
opposed and normatively inferior to individual free-
dom. A conservative attitude resurrected the
autonomy
of extra-political authority—that is, of the old
social
and ontological hierarchies—and made political power
their logical consequence. This conservative version
stressed the voluntary
and even spontaneous commit-
ment of
subordinates to their authorities, and con-
trasted it to the potential reality of a democratic dicta-
torship which made the enforcement of
equal liberty
an aspect of political power.
In each of these versions the inferior principle was
acknowledged as valid
in its own sphere, however
inferior: the liberals reluctantly recognized a
delimited
sphere of authoritative power, and the conservatives
admitted the validity of an individual liberty whose
exercise must be
regulated. Despite their overt conflict
over the value of authority,
liberals and conservatives
thus shared mirror images of the proportionate
relation
between authority and liberty. They also shared a
susceptibility to the intellectual currents of the modern
period. The
actual content of modern ideas of political
authority came from the
succession of empirical, ideal-
ist, and
scientist intellectual modes which affected
liberals and authoritarians
alike. The sequence pro-
duced, as exemplars,
Locke, Rousseau, Marx, and Mill
in the liberal school, and Burke, Hegel,
and Comte
in the conservative school.
The initial assumptions of the liberal position were
set by Locke when he
used the empirical employment
of reason to posit the primacy of
intellectual freedom,
and the natural-law idea of government to posit
the
primacy of freedom in politics. For Locke and the
empiricists who
followed him, intellectual authority
was associated both with the
repressiveness of sectarian
dogma and with the compulsion of deductive
reasoning
from putatively self-evident axioms on the Cartesian
model.
What was freely embraced as self-evident by
some must be taken on trust by
others, and what was
necessarily concluded from it must take on the
aspect
of coercion from the outside. In politics, analogously,
the
empiricists associated authority with power and,
by virtue of this
association, remained chronically sus-
picious of it. Locke persisted in refuting as invalid
“paternal power” that which Filmer justified as
“fatherly authority,” and Locke himself referred to
the
legislative sovereign, which he so stringently limited,
indiscriminately as the “Supream Authority” and the
“Supream Power” (Filmer, pp. 58, 62; Locke, pp. 162,
376-78).
But the generally hostile attitude of the empiricists
toward authority,
based upon their view of it as an
aspect of power, was qualified by their
acknowl-
edgment of an uncoercive
dimension of it, transitional
and subordinate in scope but adequate to
explain the
power. Thus Locke implicitly accepted the temporary
intellectual authority of men who show the way to
truth through their exemplary use of the “natural
faculties” common to all over those who first receive
such truth as “imperfect and unsteady notions.” In
politics he explicitly provided for a valid if sporadic
autonomous role for authority when he legitimated the
exercise of supreme legislative power over society only
“by Authority received” from the society itself; and
the supreme power, therefore, was a trustee of this
authority (Locke, p. 374). Since Locke declared the
supreme power to be sacred and inviolable in its ex-
ecution of the trust, save for egregious violation, the
original authority was confined to an emergency role
while the transferred authority simply legitimated the
daily exercise of political power.
Rousseau pioneered the application of idealism to
the liberal idea of
authority, laying down the doctrines
that would run as assumptions from
Kant to Giuseppe
Mazzini. The anti-authoritarian cast of liberal
idealism
was patent in Rousseau's use of equality to provide
the
uniformity which had been the traditional function
of authority. He
rejected any “natural authority” of
one man over
another, and he made no distinction
between the invalid claims to such
authority and the
invalid exercise of power by the claimant. Moreover,
his labelling of the general will interchangeably as the
“sovereign power” and the “sovereign
authority” left
little autonomous scope for an idea of authority
be-
tween the equal rights of the
constituent individuals
and the collective legislative power into which
they
were immediately converted. Thus an act of sover-
eignty on the one hand involves no
“superior” and
“inferior” or
even any conformity of one person's will
to another's; but on the other
hand it is guaranteed
by “the public force”
(Rousseau, II, 27-45). The social
contract produces, not authority as in
seventeenth-
century theory, but
the transmutation of one kind of
liberty (natural) into another (civil and
moral).
But Rousseau did provide for one kind of exceptional
authority, distinct
both from the citizen's rights and
the government's powers. In appearance
an atavistic
classical revival, it foreshadowed the one generally
acceptable function of autonomous authority in mod-
ern times. Rousseau resorted to the initiative of the
unofficial,
extralegal “Legislator” who, “capable of
using neither force nor reason, must recur to an au-
thority of another order, which can engage men with-
out violence and persuade without convincing
them”
(Rousseau, II, 51-53). This was an archaic
formulation
of the inimitable innovative role of authority. In the
form of a temporary dictatorship of the virtuous elite
who would inaugurate
regimes of democratic freedom
Robespierre and Mazzini would modernize this role
of authority
into the one kind of power that was not
reducible to men's liberties and
yet would be a final
resort of liberals in search of a lever for change.
Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill, each in his own
way, applied the logic of
science to the principles of
liberal idealism and thereby developed the
liberal atti-
tude toward authority into a
definite but compound
concept of authority. In this liberal concept
authority
was indissolubly joined to power, but there was in it
a
categorical distinction between the conservative
function of authority
which subordinates it to the needs
of any established power and the
innovative function
of authority which subordinates the executive
powers
to its own transcendent design. For Marx, authority
in the
first function was a simple rationalization of
oppressive power and
material exploitation; as such,
it has characterized every stable society.
Authority in
the second sense would be embodied in the dictatorship
of
the proletariat, as the transitional agency with the
function of directing
political power beyond the class
purposes which are essential to political
power into
the classless society which dispenses with political
power.
“Revolution,” admitted Engels in his article
“On Authority,” “is the most authoritarian
thing there
is” (F. Engels, “Über das
Autoritätsprinzip (Dell' Auto-
rità),” in Die Neue Zeit,
32, 1 [1914]).
Mill articulated his idea of authority as a principle
of control even more
precisely when he pronounced
the most prominent theme in modern history to
be the
persistent “struggle between Liberty and
Authority”
in which liberty was the superior principle and author-
ity, in the sense of political power
abetted by the social
tyranny of the majority, the threat to it (Mill,
pp.
121-33). In the main line of Mill's argument, authority,
power,
and compulsion were equivalent, and they
represented the collective
antithesis of liberty—
conceived as exclusively
individual—which must nec-
essarily either limit them or be limited by them. “The
authority of society over the individual” was inevitably
a
coercive authority, using political power and social
constraints as
equivalent means and validly employed
only in the compulsive function of
enforcing the pro-
tection of its members
from injury. In his essay “On
Liberty,” Mill denied
the whole category of uncoercive
authority which had traditionally mediated
between
official power and individual freedom, for he rejected
the
functions it was designed to perform for individuals
in favor of functions
to be performed by individuals
for themselves. When he addressed himself to
the
time-honored function of authority in producing social
unity, Mill
not only denied authority as a means but
repudiated the hitherto sacred
quest for unity as an
end, exalting individuality and diversity in its stead.
thority, and, therefore, by the necessary conditions of
the case, the same for all,” is to follow “a narrow theory
of life” (Mill, pp. 177-78).
But like other liberals Mill too resurrected an auton-
omous authority as a kind of Rdeus
ex machina to initiate
movement between the rigidly balanced
spheres of
freedom and power. Mill's theoretical stasis resulted
from
the antinomy in his theory of anti-authoritarian
democracy: the majority of
the individuals whom he
declared liberated from superior authority
themselves
formed a coercive uniform authority over the rest,
imposing
thereby not only a new kind of egalitarian
tyranny but, by crushing
originality, a paralysis of
human affairs. “No government by a
democracy or a
numerous aristocracy, either in its political acts or
in
the opinions, qualities, and tone of mind which it
fosters, ever
did or could rise above mediocrity, except
insofar as the sovereign Many
have let themselves be
guided... by the counsels and influence of a
more
highly gifted and instructed One or Few” (ibid., pp.
181-82).
Characteristically, in view of the political orienta-
tion of the period, Mill proposed that this
innovative
authority occupy a higher, uncoercive level within
government itself. His formula for government was
“the greatest
dissemination of power consistent with
efficiency, but the greatest
possible centralization of
information and diffusion of it from the
center,” and
he expected that in contrast to its limited
“actual
power” the central governmental organ of this
function
would issue “advice,” which
“would naturally carry
much authority” (ibid., pp.
227-28). Thus in the final
analysis, even this remnant of independent
innovating
authority remained connected with the authority in
power,
with the effect of merely softening the harsh
impact of necessary coercion
upon human liberty.
Conservative theorists of authority between the
mid-eighteenth and the
mid-nineteenth centuries re-
versed the
relationships posited by the liberals and
emerged with a different idea of
authority itself. Where
the liberals aligned authority with power and ac-
knowledged a subordinate place to both
vis-à-vis free-
dom, conservatives
aligned freedom with power and
acknowledged a subordinate place to both
vis-à-vis
authority. Since the theory of conservatism (as
distinct
from men's hoary conservative attitude) arose to
counter the
offensive of liberal theory the corre-
spondence is hardly surprising. The conservatives, like
the
liberals, acknowledged the association of authority
with political
power—in view of the period's actual
focus on political and
constitutional issues they could
hardly do otherwise—but where
the liberals acknowl-
edged persistent
authority as a function of power the
conservatives acknowledged power as an outgrowth of
persistent
authority. And where liberals tended to con-
ceive the relationship of authority and liberty disjunc-
tively, as an opposition of coercion and freedom,
rec-
oncilable 'only through the
intermittent innovative
function of authority, the conservatives conceived
the
relationship conjunctively. For them men's liberty and
the
authoritative control over its valid extent were
complements; men's
continuous assent to the perma-
nent ordering
function of authority made for a constant
harmony between liberty and
coercion.
The conservative theory of authority first arose from
Edmund Burke's
empirical approach to the stratified
reality of the eighteenth-century
political society in
his Reflections on the Revolution in
France (1790). He
made ideas out of the facts of most men's
persistent
loyalties to their traditional institutions, and deliber-
ately opposed them to the despotic
union of freedom
and force. Declaring that “liberty, when men
act in
bodies, is power,” Burke invoked an organic compound
of accepted institutions, traditions, and beliefs—a
compound
covered by the idea of autonomous authori-
ties—to restrain the liberty and shape the power. When
it
acts “as if in the presence of canonized forefathers,
the spirit
of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and
excess, is tempered with an
awful gravity.” The gov-
erning
power, similarly, should be viewed as consti-
tuted by a whole series of
“establishments”—“estab-
lished church,”
“established monarchy,” “established
aristocracy,” and “established
democracy”—whose
function is to build the authority
of religious principle,
fundamental law, permanent property, and local
at-
tachment into the very exercise of
political power.
Thus is “power” rendered
“gentle” by the support of
“ancient
opinions and rules of life” (Burke, pp. 19, 33,
43, 62, 90-91,
105-08).
The same idealistic impulse which developed the
idea of liberty into the
doctrine of freedom elaborated
the revived appreciation of tradition into a
new phi-
losophy of authority. Starting from
the insight vouch-
safed by the
individualistic premisses of the liberal
spokesmen, conservative idealists
approached authority
as a fundamental type of interpersonal relations.
The
most profound of these—indeed, the most penetrating
and
fruitful analysis of authority ever written—was
undoubtedly in
Hegel's discussion of “Lordship and
Bondage”
(Herrschaft und Knechtschaft) in his Phe-
nomenology of
Mind of 1807 (Hegel, Phenomenology,
pp.
228-40). As in the rest of the Phenomenology the
reference of the analysis was at once historical and
ontological: the
master-servant relationship of a past
era was the historical form of the
universal relationship
of independence and dependence among
individuals
which has been built into every consciousness as a
tiation of individuals into superiors and subordinates,
in this analysis, is a necessary moment in the essential
process of the individual's realizing his own identity
by becoming conscious of himself as an independent
being. This process is a common social enterprise be-
cause individuals can become certain of their own
identities only when they are confirmed by the recog-
nition of others, and the distinction between superior
and subordinate consciousnesses is an essential mode
of recognition in this common enterprise. The distinc-
tion is essential originally because there is an inevitable
superiority of the individual who secures recognition
of his independence over the individual who recognizes
it by serving him. But if the ascertainment of individual
identity through recognition thus starts from an initial
one-directional hierarchy of independent and depend-
ent individuals, with equal necessity its realization
requires the development of reciprocity and of mutual
recognition. The relationship thus begins to assume the
character of a division of function within the common
enterprise of achieving the self-identity of all individ-
uals. For the master becomes dependent upon the
servant for the recognition of his independence and
requires an independence in the servant for this exter-
nal recognition; the servant, analogously, internalizes
the independence he recognizes in the ruler and con-
firms his own identity in the external form which he
gives to his labor for the master.
The crucial features of Hegel's analysis were, first,
the demonstration that
the recognition of the superior
by the subordinate for his function in an
enterprise
common to both is the fundamental factor in an au-
thoritative relationship and, second,
his explicit infer-
ence that this
relationship must inevitably transcend
the power of the master over the
servant to entail the
mutual dependence of their functions and the recipro-
cal independence of their identities
as superior and
subordinate.
Thus unlimited hierarchical power, the original form
of authority, was
essentially modified in Hegel's scheme
by the equalizing exchange of its
qualities between the
superior who becomes dependent and the
subordinate
who gets oriented toward independence as each looks
to the
other in their joint realization of authority. From
this scheme two
consequences could follow: the master-
servant dialectic could proceed to the complete equal-
ization and mutual identification of the parties or
the
original hierarchy and determinate identities of supe-
rior and subordinate could be synthesized in an open-
ended process which would preserve the
essential ele-
ments of both. The Young
Hegelians, including Marx,
would draw the first conclusion. Hegel himself
pro-
ceeded to draw the second. He
produced the standard
conservative philosophy of political authority, in which
the
publicly recognized political power of the sover-
eign over his subjects was the mold which gave a
hierarchical
form to the ultimate values of free indi-
viduals. Political authority furnished the only principle
of
hierarchy whose origin was acceptable to free indi-
viduals and whose purpose transcended the range of
its original
power. For Hegel, this authority of the
state, vis-à-vis its
constituent individuals and families,
was both “their higher
power” and “their immanent
purpose.” The
function of the sovereign monarch is
precisely to unite authority and power
in the state.
The princely power, and the other powers of the state
a fortiori, are valid only as organs in the service
of
the “unconditioned,”
“self-starting,” and “self-deter-
mined” authority of
the monarch to realize the
moral unity of the state (Hegel, Philosophie des
Rechts, pp. 209-16, 240-45). For
Hegel, and for
conservative idealists in general, the coercive powers
of these organs are appropriate instruments of this
moral authority.
Scientism, in the shape of French positivism, pro-
vided still a third dimension to the conservative doc-
trine of authority. Positivism as such, with
its rejection
of belief and its insistence upon observation, experi-
ence, experiment, and a posteriori reasoning, seemed
to offer a hostile environment for
ideas of authority,
as Mill's version of the doctrine attests, and even
in
its native French form it would sponsor progressive
sociology as
well as authoritarian politics. But the
conservative political line of
positivist origin was not
therefore merely fortuitous. The commitment to
au-
thority which seemed eccentric and
ambiguous in
Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism, would be
regularized into firm political principle in later posi-
tivists like Hippolyte Taine, Charles Maurras, and Vil-
fredo Pareto. For the mechanics of
scientific political
conservatism it is nonetheless to Comte that we
must
look. His combination of the modern claims for social
science
with the equally modern view of political
authority as the official
exercise of power first revealed
the distinctive feature in the modern
conservative idea
of political authority—the insistence both
upon the
immunity of social superiors from political power and
upon
their capacity to employ political power.
Comte explicitly posed the problem by declaring the
crucial issue for
society to be precisely the relationship
between spiritual and temporal
authority. Spiritual
authorities—i.e., the intellectual
elite—direct social
belief through “neither force nor
reason,” but rather
through the “confidence
spontaneously accorded intel-
lectual and
moral superiority.” Temporal authorities—
i.e., the
political governors—control social action
through the
application of “practical or material
was to assign spiritual authority innovative priority in
the direction of social progress (in “dynamic sociol-
ogy”) and political authority conservative priority in
the maintenance of social order (in “static sociology”),
and to insist upon their mutual separation and inviola-
bility. Actually, however, he went beyond this nominal
solution, which scarcely differed in principle from the
liberal Mill's, to the characteristic conservative device
of connecting the uncoercive authority of the innovator
or the founder with the coercive authority of the organs
which would enforce the innovation. Comte created
the conservative model of this device by stipulating
the orderly mission of the innovation and the quasi-
political structure of the innovating authority. Thus
the function of spiritual authority in the static positivist
society of the future will be to educate men continu-
ously in the understanding of the social order as a
whole. As such, spiritual authority was associated with
temporal power in the sense of “attaching morality
to politics as the latter's point of departure.” By dint
of this attachment, in turn, spiritual authority assumed
the equivalent of a political structure. This authority
is a “moral government”; it “rules ideas and morals”;
it must “institute a system of public and private man-
ners (habitudes) favoring the growth of the feeling of
social solidarity, on the model of [medieval] Catholic-
ism”; it arbitrates social disputes and includes interna-
tional relations within its competence. In its social
monopoly over education, the intellectual authority is
“decisive,” as is the temporal authority in the sphere
of politics (Comte, II, 485-602).
Comte's innovative intellectual authority may be
viewed as the limiting case
for the modern conservative
idea of authority in general. Whenever the
function
of nonpolitical authority was conceived to be the ex-
tension of human community rather than
training for
the rights of man, this authority was deemed both
continuous with and formative of valid political au-
thority. Whether such nonpolitical authority was pro-
gressive and intellectual like Comte's or
traditional and
corporate like Taine's, its political role was made theo-
retically possible by the osmotic
exchange through
which conservative theorists modified the principled
independence of social from political authority. They
admitted a social
equivalent of political power in the
functioning of social authority and a
moral equivalent
of social authority in the ultimate ends of political
power. They sought thereby to regularize and modern-
ize the principle of hierarchy which was being com-
pressed by the dominant liberal temper of nine-
teenth-century Europe to the
status of a chronic
anachronism with at best a transitional validity.
V
In the recent period of its history, the idea of au-
thority has been examined most intensively in its social
context
and the idea has been developed most reveal-
ingly in social science and social theory. As in the other
main
periods and contexts of its development, two
distinct stages must be
identified. From the late nine-
teenth
century to the 1920's changes in the approach
to authority were embodied
especially in the writings
of sociologists who took over from the preceding
pe-
riod the integral association of
authority and power
in politics but who sought to work out autonomous
roles for social authority as such, consonant with the
autonomy of the
social science which they were estab-
lishing. In its second stage the ideas of social authority
have been
reunited with political power both approv-
ingly in the ideology of fascist totalitarianism and
reprovingly in
the equally total revulsion of the
New—i.e.,
post-communist—Left from it.
1. Sociology of Authority.
Because they reflected
the new preeminence of industrial society as
the pri-
mary unit of human association and the
main arena
of collective activity, the great pioneers of sociology
assiduously recast authority into a social relation signi-
fying a voluntary or conventional interaction categor-
ically detached from its political
connection with
coercive power. But because this early age of the
industrial society was also a period of democratization
these founders of
sociology had also to take into ac-
count the
interpenetration of society and state. They
tended also to be political
sociologists who approached
politics as a special kind of social relation.
Hence they
sought to develop the idea of autonomous social au-
thorities which were independent of the
modern state
in their origins but were integrated into it, as a social
dimension of politics, in their contemporary effects.
They thus carried one
stage further the sociological
politics of the conservative positivists and
reversed
their priorities: where the positivists extended the state
into society and applied political criteria of coercion
to social
relations, the sociologists extended society into
the state and sought to
develop double-edged concepts
appropriate to the intersection.
The only pure—i.e., spontaneous and uncoercive—
social
authorities in the new sociology tended to be
dead authorities. Almost
invariably these authorities
were identified as prestigious individuals,
patriarchal
elders, hallowed traditions, or divinely anointed men
and
offices whose origins in and relevance to an earlier
stage of society were
emphatically acknowledged by
the sociologists. They also acknowledged the
persist-
ence of such authorities into
modern times, to be sure,
but only as atavisms. Thus the early
Émile Durkheim
type of society and equality to the progressing organic
type. “The authority of the collective conscience is...
in large part composed of the authority of tradition,”
and, in turn, “it is the authority of age [the old people,
the unique intermediary between the present and the
past] which gives tradition its authority.” Both of these
associated authorities—of tradition and the elders—
“necessarily diminish” along with the archaic, seg-
mental type of society from which they come
(Durkheim, Division of Labor, pp. 291-93).
The sociologists' atavistic definition of social author-
ity received a precise terminological confirmation
from
Max Weber, divergent as his sociological assumptions
were from
Durkheim's in other respects. Weber care-
fully distinguished from the concept of
“power”
(Macht) the
“more precise sociological concept of 'au-
thority'” (Herrschaft),
defining power as “any proba-
bility of imposing one's will within a social relationship
even
against resistance” and authority as “the proba-
bility of securing obedience to
definite commands from
a relevant group of men” (Weber, Grundriss, pp.
28-29). Weber's general definition of
authority was
obviously designed to include within the sociological
concept the social dimension of political “commands”
which produced obedience without coercion, but, as
the connotation of Herrschaft—lordship or
dominion—
indicates, this general definition enclosed an
ambiguity
between the more or less compelling motives of obedi-
ence. Weber made no explicit distinctions
of principle
within authority as Herrschaft, since
he acknowledged
“the belief in legitimacy” to be the
indispensable basis
of all its forms, but in his elaboration of the three
main
types of authority a verbal distinction appeared which
reflected
a subtle differentiation within his idea of
authority. When analyzing the
concept of Herrschaft
in the context of the
“compliance,... the will to obey”
on the part of its
objects, Weber added the imported
term Autorität in apposition with Herrschaft,
and in
his analysis of the three legitimate bases of Herrschaft
he applied Autorität
to the charismatic and traditional
types of authority but only Herrschaft to the legal, or
bureaucratic, type
(ibid., p. 122; Weber, Religions-
soziologie, I, 268-73). Since Weber thought
of the
three types as successively dominant in the develop-
ment of society he was implying a distinctive connota-
tion of authority—Autorität—for the two types he
recognized frankly to be primarily representative of
“the
past” and to extend only “as survivals” into
the
present.
The obvious point of this historical approach to
social authority was to
indicate as sociological fact
what had for some three centuries been
proposed as
anthropological principle: that the religious and natu-
ral hierarchies, such as the church and the
family,
which had traditionally anchored the social roots of
authority
were now declining institutions, supported
rather by the inertia of past
social relations than by
relevance to contemporary society. But this
empirical
confirmation was not the main function of the social
analysis. Its main function was rather to set in relief
the separate
identity of the principle of authority
which was relevant to the
contemporary industrial
society. This modern principle of authority had to
be
defined both in terms of the new dependence upon
the rational
calculations of coercive power which dis-
tinguished it from the outmoded autonomous social
authorities of
the past, and in terms of its inheritance
from these social authorities of
the past. Hence the
sociologists analyzed the relationship of the old
and
new authorities as both a difference of type and a
succession of
stages for the purposes of demonstrating
the political categories
dominating modern ideas of
authority and examining the modern role of the
ata-
vistic social authorities. The
results of these inquiries
indicated, in general, the actual role of modern
ideas
of authority to be the social buttressing of political
hierarchy, but their normative role to be the
rational
organization of the highly integrated modern industrial
society. For an example of the first kind of analysis
we may refer to
Pareto's revealing categories. For an
example of the second we may refer to
the collabo-
rative sociological study by
Max Horkheimer's Institute
for Social Research on “authority and
family.”
Although Pareto, in The Mind and Society,
distin-
guished formally between
“a governing, political elite”
and “a
non-governing, non-political elite” within the
generic elite
class and defined membership in this
generic elite by a superior capacity
in any social activ-
ity whatsoever, he
proceeded to work out the authority
of this elite in terms of its relations
with political
power. It became, in the context of its authority over
the nonelite, simply “the higher stratum of society,
which
usually contains the rulers”; their superior
capacities were
epitomized into what was suitable for
“keeping them in
power” and “exercising the functions
of
government” and what kept them “willing enough
to use
force” (Pareto, #2041-57). The circulation of
elites, moreover,
is a process which is effected primar-
ily in
the lower-class nonelite's moving into the gov-
erning elite and in elitists' dropping out of the govern-
ing class through a process which
demonstrates the
inevitable triumph of superior political capacity,
wherever it may be found, over social “label.” Thus
Pareto's theory of the elite served both to blur the lines
between social
and political dominant classes in favor
of social persuasion, to the ever-changing possessors
of political power.
In their monumental Studien über Autorität
und
Familie (Studies of Authority and the
Family) of 1936,
the team of democratic socialists associated
with
Horkheimer in the Institute for Social Research (Insti-
tut für
Sozialforschung) faced squarely the decisive
problem raised
by the sociological approach to author-
ity:
that social authority was a characteristic product
of the declining,
pre-industrial stage of Western civili-
zation and yet that authority in some form remained
a prominent
feature of the industrial age. Alerted by
the recent rise of fascist
totalitarianism—in Hork-
heimer's words, by “the transition to so-called authori-
tative forms of state in the
present period”—the Insti-
tute team, which included Erich Fromm and Herbert
Marcuse, saw
authority, in the general sense of the
“affirmed
dependence” of “the larger part of men”
upon “the smaller,” as a central category of
“all forms
of society,” both archaic and modern, and
they con-
ceived their mission to be the
understanding of the
changing forms of authority which corresponded to
the
changing forms of society (Studien, pp. 22-25).
The most striking theoretical contribution of the
project was embodied in
the convergent demonstration
(by Horkheimer, Fromm, and Marcuse from their
re-
spective sociological,
socio-psychological, and socio-
philosophical approaches) of the underlying authori-
tarianism in the apparently
anti-authoritarian attitudes
of the modern, liberal.
“bourgeois” era. Liberals, in
this view, created a
new form of authority by stressing
the voluntary submission of putatively
free individuals
to natural, metaphysical, or psychic constraints
which
were actually reified forms of authoritarian control by
a
dominant social group. The Institute team acknowl-
edged, from this historical analysis, that authority had
both
progressive (innovative) and reactionary (repres-
sive) functions for society. But they stopped short of
applying
their models of authority to the mature in-
dustrial society of their own day. The signs of dissolu-
tion in the characteristically bourgeois forms of
authority—the forms of economic exploitation—were
both obviously perceptible and theoretically account-
able, but contemporary forms of authority to
replace
them were not. For there was a profound difference
between the
team's theoretical expectation of a “ra-
tional authority,” freely accepted by “the
executors”
from “the directors” of joint
social enterprises in the
common interest of both, and their actual
perception
of the “total-authoritarian state” which
made impossi-
ble “the hierarchy
of authorities” in society necessary
for any “system
of authority” (ibid., pp. 48, 134-35,
219-22).
Nor was the problem posed by the gulf between the
normative and actual
tendencies of modern authority
resolved by the Institute's empirical
inquiry into the
structure of the contemporary family, which was ap-
proached not as an archaic locus of
authority but rather
as a social microcosm of all authority. The
empirical
section of the Studien was a progress
report, stipulating
the completeness of the method and the
incompleteness
of the result. Only the tentative indication of a
social
split between a peasantry still involved in the patriar-
chal family, an urban working class
inclined toward
the matriarchal family, and a lower middle class
(Mittelstand) caught indecisively between both tend-
encies, furnished a substantive
confirmation of the crisis
of divided social authorities which was throwing
the
social “education for authority” into the hands
of the
totalitarian state (ibid., pp. 75, 304-18, 905).
2. Totalitarian Authority.
Even the furthest socio-
logical
advance toward the definition of a modern
principle of social authority
fell short of the reality
of contemporary society and remained an
essentially
historical definition. The further development of the
idea
of authority lay with the political totalitarians and
with the radical
antitotalitarians who have reacted
constructively against them. Both groups
acknowledge
that the contemporary vacuum of social authority is
being
filled with political instruments of social control.
Both the totalitarians
and the radical antitotalitarians
of the twentieth century have thus gone a
crucial step
beyond the conservatives and liberals of the nineteenth:
where nineteenth-century political thinkers had de-
fended the superiority of authority or liberty respec-
tively but admitted the autonomy and
subordinate
validity of the opposite principle, their twentieth-
century socio-political
successors asserted the exclusive
validity of authority or liberty
respectively, and cate-
gorically worked
out the entire absorption or denial
of the opposite principle.
The development of a distinctive totalitarian idea
of authority has been
largely the work of fascists, for
however authoritarian in practice the
structure and
policies of communist parties and regimes may be, they
correspond to no viable idea of authority. Soviet ideol-
ogy has tended to exacerbate the special ambiguity
of
authority which arose when Lenin specified Marx's
innovative
dictatorship of the majority to be in the
charge of a centralized and
disciplined professional
vanguard who would use violence and terror to
initiate
the regime of freedom—the ambiguity, that is, of
stressing power and liberty to the detriment of any
intermediary concept of
authority. Thus the occasional
ideological concessions, during the Stalin
period, to the
factual conversion of the revolutionary vanguard into
a
long-term political and bureaucratic elite—conces-
vocation of leadership” and the “monolithic Party”—
remained theoretically isolated, alternating with the
more frequent endorsement of democratic controls
from below and excluded from the dominant theory
which justifies present political power in terms of fu-
ture freedom from politics (Moore, passim).
Despite the actual penetration of state and party
into the society,
moreover, communists distinguish in
principle between the political power
which withers
away and the social organization which remains, a
distinction which again obscures the idea of authority.
For it remains
uncertain, in doctrine, whether the
replacement of the government of men by
the admin-
istration of things is making
for a rational society with
an uncoercive guiding authority or for a free
society
with a functionally differentiated collaboration among
equals.
For the fascists, on the contrary, the idea of authority
was so central to
both their programs and their policies
as to escape the problems of
interpretation which the
professed instrumentalism of their doctrine and
the
glaring inconsistencies of their theory and practice
raise for so
many of their other ideas. Certain of these
problems,
indeed—like the relations between the con-
servative and revolutionary facets of
fascism—are illu-
minated by the
clarity of their approach to authority.
For the fascists, the political
model of authority—the
recognition of legitimacy in the organs
which actually
exercise the collective power of the society—was
the
model of authority as such, and the conservative reten-
tion or the revolutionary dismantling of the
existing
social authorities varied with the requirements of the
political model.
The political definition of social authority was ex-
plicit in La dottrina del Fascismo,
published under
Mussolini's name but written by Giovanni Gentile,
philosopher of Italian Fascism: “The State not only is
authority
which governs and molds individual wills
with laws and values of spiritual
life, but it is also
power which makes its will prevail abroad.... For
the Fascist, everything is within the State and...
neither individuals or
groups are outside the State....
For Fascism the State is an absolute,
before which
individuals and groups are only relative”
(Mussolini,
pp. 12-16, 33). The Fascist model of political authority
thus extended through the social structure and the
external spheres of
private rights to implant the rule
of coercive power within the innermost
spirit of the
individual. “The Fascist State... is the form
and
internal norm of the whole person.... Fascism aims
at discipline,
and at an authority which penetrates the
soul and rules there
incontestably” (ibid., pp. 17-18).
For, as Gentile would explain
in his own name, there
is no essential distinction between “the two terms
'State' and 'individual': far from being “a limit to his
liberty,” the State “is the universal aspect of the indi-
vidual,... the concrete actuality of his
will” (Gentile,
pp. 124-31).
Like fascists in general, the German National So-
cialists used the idea of authority in a political context
to
link the public power with an original principle
detached from any roots in
and responsibility to social
tradition or democratic rights. In Mein Kampf Hitler
almost invariably referred to
authority as “state au-
thority” (Staatsautorität) and
he repeatedly charac-
terized the Nazi
conception of authority as one “which
knows only an authority
which proceeds downward
from the top and a responsibility which proceeds
up-
ward from the bottom” (Speeches, I, 180, 201, 502).
But unlike the Italian
Fascists, the Nazis denied the
cultural primacy of the State and hence
undermined
the ultimacy of its authority as the valid source of
political power. For Hitler, the belief that the very
existence of the
State is the ground of its sanctity and
requires “the dog-like
veneration of the so-called state
authority” was a
“legitimist” absurdity which distorted
a means into
an end-in-itself. Actually, the State is “a
means to the end of
maintaining and promoting the
racial nation (Volkstum),” and the State authority is
“the
sovereign incorporation of a racial nation's in-
stinct and common will for self-preservation” (Mein
Kampf, pp. 426, 433, 440). For the Nazis,
then, politi-
cal authority was explicitly
instrumental, and they
referred it, for its own legitimacy, to the
suprapolitical
good of the race whose instrument it was. Here was
the
basis in Nazi doctrine for the later claim, to be
made by Nazis and
anti-Nazis alike, that National
Socialism neither espoused nor realized the
totalitarian
state, since political institutions composed but one of
its several lines of control. But it was precisely because
it was deemed a
political instrument that the principle
of authority became crucial in the
Nazi scheme, for
it became the transferable means of applying the po-
litical model of power to all the lines of
fascist control—
Party, corporate, and personal—and
made possible a
plural totalitarianism transcending the traditional
organs of state.
The idea of authority was the point at which the
traditional principle of
hierarchy and the modern
principle of national sovereignty were joined to
be-
come compatible means of power for all
social orga-
nizations whatsoever. Hitler,
for example, endorsed
two ideas of authority which were reminiscent of
its
original meanings, but he now linked them closely to
the exercise
of coercive power: first, “the authority of
personality,” which cannot brook control by “any ma-
jority”; secondly, the authority
of leadership in the
community, is “a high responsibility to the commu-
nity,” and makes the fundamental natural relationship
between “initiation” (Führung) and “execution” (Aus-
führung) the justification of the power relationship be-
tween “domination” (Überordnung) and “subordina-
tion” (Unterordnung) (Hitler, Tischgespräche, p. 171).
Thus Hitler, and the fascists in general, took the
distinctive ideas of
authority out of their original per-
sonal and
social contexts, applied them to the justifica-
tion of coercive power, and in this politicized form,
reapplied
them to the organization of man's social and
personal activities and to the
molding of his ideas about
them. Since, indeed, the idea of authority laid
particu-
lar stress upon the voluntary
component in the submis-
sion to power, it
was particularly appropriate to total-
itarian use for thought-control.
3. Post-totalitarian Ideas of Authority.
The con-
temporary intellectual
opposition to fascism tended to
defend familiar liberal ideas, including
those of the
democratic limits upon and accountability of authority.
The intellectually significant response to totalitarianism
has been a
post-fascist phenomenon. The change from
the liberal view of authority to a
radical attack on
authority was developed after World War II by the
movements of the New Left, which sees in fascism not
a case of the
political abuse of authority but a key
to the ubiquity of oppressive
authoritative power
throughout society.
This conviction of the New Left has taken two forms,
depending on whether
the oppression in the power-
authority
syndrome is seen to come primarily from the
power or from the authority.
The first of these alterna-
tives has been
developed by those in the New Left
who represent a connection with the old:
for them
social authority, in the sense of the force for voluntary
submission in men's primary relation, is the charac-
teristic means of power produced by advanced indus-
trial society; it is essentially a
pre-coercive power
which controls men's will by determining their
needs
and as such it is continuous with the coercive political
power
which is merely its extension. “Contemporary
industrial
society,” in the formulation of Herbert
Marcuse, a prominent
spokesman for this group, is
“one-dimensional.” It
“tends to be totalitarian. For
'totalitarian' is not only a
terroristic political coordi-
nation of
society, but also a non-terroristic economic-
technical coordination which operates through
the
manipulation of needs by vested interests.... Under
the rule of a
repressive whole, liberty can be made
into a powerful instrument of
domination” (Marcuse,
One-Dimensional Man, pp. 3, 7).
But this strand of the New Left has not gone the
whole way to the rejection
of authority. It condemns
every real form of authority because of its unvarying
association with repressive power rather than the idea
of authority as
such. Marcuse, for example, asserts the
desirability of “the
combination of centralized author-
ity and
direct democracy” and implies the authority
of Reason in the
shape of the “dialectical concept”
and
“the critical theory of society”—forms of
authority
devoid of social or political power. The categorical
rejection of authority is the result rather of other
spokesmen of the New
Left whose deliberately formless
attitudes are most clearly grasped in the
glosses they
have contributed to anarchism. The most obvious shift
of
emphasis in the new anarchism has been from the
concentration on political
authority characteristic of
“historical
anarchism”—i.e., the anarchism of Godwin,
Proudhon,
Bakunin, and Kropotkin—to “the rejection
of authority
as such, whatever its form or field”
(Heintz, pp. 9-12).
But this shift has been more than one of scope, for
along with the expansion
of the anarchist target from
all political forms to all social forms of
authority has
come a shift from the denial of authority as the source
of compulsive power to the denial of the very elements
which have always
distinguished the idea of authority
from the idea of power. First, where
the historical
anarchists denied the validity of any natural hierarchy
or scale of moral values or conferral of rights which
could serve as the
basis of the legal authority of some
individuals
over others, the neo-anarchists insist upon
the natural, moral, social,
intellectual, and personal
equality of all individuals and upon the
consequent
illegitimacy of any relationship based on the pretended
superiority of some individuals over others, whether
innate, ethical,
conventional, or contracted. Second,
neo-anarchism condemns all
institutions—that is, en-
during
arrangements—not only because of their inevi-
table tendency toward bureaucratization (as in histori-
cal anarchism) but more fundamentally
because as such
they inevitably entail the authority of the past over
the present. Finally, the neo-anarchists insist on the
spontaneity, the
open-endedness, and the planlessness
of their enterprises because the
definition of universal
ends and the elaboration of programmatic designs
to-
ward those ends entail the authority of
the future over
the present.
In this set of rejections the New Left clearly denies
the whole set of
original, unperverted meanings of
authority. It denies the personal
authority of natural
capacity and acquired merit; it denies the creation
of
authority by transfer or delegation of rights; it denies
the
authority of age and experience, whether in fami-
lies or traditions; and it denies the authority of the
author, both
in terms of a special regard for founders
and their foundations and in
terms of the viability of
is initiated by others. And all these authentic kinds of
authority are denied, moreover, not because they have
been corrupted by their association with power but
because they are in themselves illegitimate exercises
of power and because the functions of personal respect,
social continuity, and communicated creation which
these authorities purport to serve are better served by
the untrammeled interaction of absolutely free and
equal individuals.
VI
The ideology of totalitarian fascism has been in
abeyance for a generation,
and the resonance of the
total antifascism of the New Left remains
uncertain.
Still, their extreme formulations of the idea of author-
ity, opposite in their evaluations but
coincident in their
convictions about its pervasiveness in modern
society
as the official mark of power, do seem to signify a
logical
conclusion to the long development of the idea.
They represent the
categorical extremes of prevalent
attitudes toward social authority which
elide its origi-
nal tensions
vis-à-vis the governmental powers and
view it simply as a stable
form of control.
But there are indications that the present generation
may be attending at
the birth of still a fifth stage in
the history of the idea of authority.
The arena of this
fifth stage would be the individual himself, and author-
ity would be a quality of the internal
relations among
his psychic elements. Certainly the hierarchical
ranking
of the individual's faculties and the attribution of au-
thority to the higher over the lower have
been promi-
nent features of Western thought
at least back to the
ancient Greeks. But heretofore the internal polity
of
the individual has been in concordance with the exter-
nal and conditioning structure of the outside
world,
whether of nature, super-nature, politics, or society.
The best
known of the recent discussions of authority
and the individual, indeed,
have been those which have
internalized the social relations of
authoritative power.
Some of our most familiar contemporary characters
are precisely such internalizations: the submissive ref-
ugee from freedom (in Fromm's Escape
from Freedom,
1941); the “authoritarian
personality,” “continuously
molded from
above” to be both “jealous of his inde-
pendence and inclined to submit blindly to power and
authority” (in T. W. Adorno, et al., The
Authoritarian
Personality [1950], pp. ix, 976); the
“inner-directed”
and
“outer-directed” “character types,”
equally and
successively programmed by society toward “conform-
ity” (in Riesman's Lonely Crowd, 1950). But if these
analyses are in
the familiar mold of demonstrating the
continuity between the hierarchy of
the cosmos and
the hierarchy of the psyche—just as the analyses of
Plato, Saint Augustine, and Descartes did in past
eras—such exercises in social psychology also contain
the
possibility of a new departure by looking to a
revised psychic hierarchy as
a crucial lever for the
dismantling or at least the scaling down of social
hier-
archy.
The implication of such concluding unscientific
postscripts for a
distinctive psychological idea of au-
thority
has been obscured by their persistence in a
social context which makes any
psychic assertion by
individuals against social repression an act of
“auton-
omy.” But
within the field of individual psychology
itself—and especially
in the field of psychoanalytic
theory—recent doctrines point
toward the transcend-
ence of social
repression not through the mere permis-
sive
freedom of individual desires but rather through
the substitution of
uncoerced authority for repression
in the relationship of the elements
within the psyche
and through the assertion of this authority, in its origi-
nal sense of moral direction, against the
repressive
power of the society.
The incipient articulation of a psychological context
for authority is being
most prominently undertaken by
neo-Freudians who have begun to develop in
theory
a structure of harmonious authority within the psyche
with the
mission of eradicating coercion from social
authority as the necessary
condition of its own realiza-
tion. Where
Freud himself could not get beyond the
dualistic and pessimistic mutual
convertibility of
“ontogenic” and
“phylogenic” repression—a limit di-
rectly related to the coercive idea of
authority through
the paradigmatic figure of the “Primal
Father” in both
the myth of the species and the fantasies of the
indi-
vidual child—radical
neo-Freudians like Marcuse and
Norman Brown have proposed the reversal of
the
psychic hierarchy of super-ego, ego, and id to serve
as the ground
for the reorganization of social relations.
The neo-Freudians insist, like
the later Freud, on the
continuity of individuals and society, but whether
in
the form of Marcuse's “idea of non-repressive sublima-
tion” (Eros and Civilization) or Brown's “construction
of a
Dionysian ego” (Life against Death) the
proper
ordering of the instincts (pleasure and reality, love and
death) and reason becomes a psychic model for the
whole society, creating
“its own hierarchy” and re-
placing (in Marcuse's terminology) “irrational author-
ity” by “rational
authority”—that is, replacing
an authority that is
not compatible with freedom by
an authority that is (Eros, pp. 205-06).
In general, however, both psychoanalytic doctrine
and the common language of
the age tend to charac-
terize such
reversions to voluntary hierarchies, whether
of psychic factors or of
individualized moral values as
conditions of freedom rather than as forms
of pure
tional reference of authority to interpersonal rather than
to intrapersonal relations, but in part too it testifies
to the cumulative history of the idea of authority which
has led to the general acceptance of the meaning which
associates it indelibly with the exercise of coercive
power. But even if it is not literally identified with
the original idea of authority, the current commitment
to a normative psychic hierarchy which should serve
to direct the reorganization of society is an indication
that the recurrent pattern of a pure, uncoercive au-
thority remains viable. With whatever idea it will
henceforth be identified, the diffusion of cultural inno-
vation by men who have no access to the means of
power persists as a recurrent theme of the idea of
authority, balancing its more dubious contribution to
extending the range of compulsion in men's lives.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
No comprehensive history or bibliography of authority
exists. The
following have been used in the preparation of
this article.
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LEONARD KRIEGER
[See also Constitutionalism; Democracy; Liberalism; Marx-ism; Reformation; Social Contract; State; Totalitarianism.]
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