Authority

In politics, authority generally refers to the ability to make laws, independent of the power to enforce them, or the ability to permit something. People obey authority out of respect, while they obey power out of fear. For example, "the congress has the authority to pass laws" vs "the police have the power to arrest law-breakers". Authority need not be consistent or rational, it only needs to be accepted as a source of permission or truth.

Related Topics:
Politics - Law - Power - Enforce - Permit

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Questions as to who has what authority often lie at the heart of political debates, and answers to those questions normally stem from practical and moral considerations, from prior practices and from theories of criminal justice or of the just war.

Related Topics:
Moral - Criminal justice - Just war

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In sociology, authority comprises a particular type of power. The dominant usage comes from functionalism and follows Weber in defining authority as power which is recognised as legitimate and justified by both the powerful and the powerless. Weber further sub-divided authority into three types:

Related Topics:
Sociology - Power - Functionalism - Weber

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• Traditional authority which simply derives from long-established habits and social structures. The right of hereditary monarchs to rule furnishes an obvious example.
• Rational-legal authority depends for its legitimacy on formal rules, usually written down, and often very complex. Modern societies depend on legal-rational authority.
• Charismatic authority. Charismatic authority is authority derived from "the gift of grace," that is, when the leader claims that his authority derives from a "higher power" (e.g. God or natural law or rights) or "inspiration" that is superior to the validity of either traditional or rational-legal authority, and followers accept this and are willing to follow this higher or inspired authority in the place of the authority that they have hitherto been following. Charismatic authority sometimes becomes the inspiration of social movements or revolution against a system of traditional or legal-rational authority. The careers of Lenin, Martin Luther, Hitler, and Lech Wa??sa provide examples. Charismatic authority never lasts long (even when successful) and it inevitably gives way to either traditional or to legal-rational authority.

As an example of the development of legal-rational authority, consider the history of France. In medieval times a king ruled simply because he was the king (i.e., he held traditional inherited authority), but by the 17th century it became necessary to invent a doctrine claiming that Louis XIV ruled by "divine right"; in other words, to justify Louis' authority by a rational claim to his appointment by a legitimate superior (God). This served for another century but was threatened by the rival claim made to legal-rational authority by the various legislative bodies of the early years of the French Revolution. This legal-rational authority was eclipsed by the charismatic authority held by Robespierre and his cohort during the Reign of Terror. Next, Robespierre's authority was replaced by the legal-rational authority of the Directory. Finally, authority in revolutionary France was a mix of the legal-rational and charismatic types during the Consulate and First Republic (the charisma in this last case being that of Napoleon Bonaparte).

Related Topics:
History of France - Medieval - King - 17th century - Doctrine - Louis XIV - God - French Revolution - Robespierre - Reign of Terror - Directory - Consulate - First Republic - Napoleon Bonaparte

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The Restoration (1814) marked a return to traditional authority but now with elements of the legal-rational as well, at least until the ascent of Charles X. His attempt to restore a more absolute monarchy brought on the July Revolution, which formally restored this balance of legal-rational and traditional in the form of a constitutional monarchy. The Revolution of 1848 passed rapidly into a legal-rational mode, falling ultimately to the Second Empire, which saw a blend of all three modes: the government Napoleon III retained a constitution of sorts and, in his person, he combined the Napoleonic charismatic claims with what was now a certain element of tradition, a Bonapartist dynasty to rival the Bourbons.

Related Topics:
Restoration - 1814 - Charles X - Absolute monarchy - July Revolution - Constitutional monarchy - Revolution of 1848 - Second Empire - Napoleon III - Bourbons

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The complex pattern can be continued practically down to the present day, with a steadily diminishing role for traditional authority, except insofar as republicanism itself has become a tradition. In the 20th century, France had at least two charismatic leaders, Philippe Pétain and Charles de Gaulle. The constitution of the Fifth Republic, overtly a legal-rational system, was tailored specifically for the purpose of creating a presidency powerful enough that the charismatic leader de Gaulle would consent to accept it.

Related Topics:
Republicanism - 20th century - Philippe Pétain - Charles de Gaulle - Fifth Republic

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Within conflict theory, "authority" is used both in the same sense as Weber's functionalist definition above and in a rather different sense. The latter is based on the observation that power is almost never endorsed in a moral sense by those who do not have it, and therefore this school of thought defines "authority" as power which is so institutionalised that it is largely unquestioned.

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Obedience to authority seems thoroughly ingrained in most of the population: the Milgram experiment showed that over 60% of a sample of Americans demonstrated willingness to torture another person to death when given orders from an appropriate authority figure. This experiment produced similar results when replicated in several other cultures. A similar effect was found in the Stanford prison experiment.

Related Topics:
Obedience - Milgram experiment - Stanford prison experiment

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