What Is Authority?

Question

What is authority, and why is it essential to political life? The question arises because authority is the foundation of political order, yet it is also the most fragile and contested of political concepts.

Quick Answer

Authority is the legitimate right to command and to be obeyed. It is different from power (the ability to coerce), influence (the capacity to persuade), and violence (the use of force). Authority rests on recognition: those subject to authority acknowledge that the person or institution issuing commands has the right to do so. The philosophical problem of authority is the problem of justification: what gives anyone the right to command others? The classic answers include: divine right, natural law, consent of the governed, expertise, and tradition. The crisis of authority in the modern world — the loss of the shared frameworks that make authority possible — is a central theme of modern political philosophy.

Historical Wisdom

Max Weber's analysis of authority is the starting point of modern sociological thought. Weber distinguishes three pure types of legitimate authority. Traditional authority rests on the belief in the sanctity of age-old customs and the status of those who exercise authority under them. Charismatic authority rests on the exceptional personal qualities of the leader — the hero, the prophet, the revolutionary. Legal-rational authority rests on the belief in the rule of law and the right of those elevated to authority under codified procedures to issue commands. For Weber, the modern world is characterized by the progressive dominance of legal-rational authority and the 'disenchantment' of the world.

Hannah Arendt's essay 'What Is Authority?' in Between Past and Future (1961) offers a different analysis. Arendt argues that authority is a distinct phenomenon that has largely disappeared from the modern world. Authority, in the Roman sense, is a kind of augmentation: it adds to the foundation, it does not command. The crisis of authority in the modern world is the loss of the tradition that made authority possible.

Philosophical Perspectives

The philosophical debate about authority centers on the question of its justification. The consent tradition, from Hobbes to Rawls, grounds authority in the consent of the governed. The expertise tradition grounds authority in knowledge: we obey doctors because they know what is best for our health. The procedural tradition grounds authority in the fairness of the procedures by which decisions are made. The critical tradition, from Marx to Foucault, questions whether authority is ever legitimate or whether it is always a mask for power.

Lessons From Thinkers

From Hobbes: authority is created by consent and justified by the preservation of peace. From Weber: authority takes different forms, and the modern world is characterized by the dominance of legal-rational authority. From Arendt: authority is a distinct phenomenon that has largely disappeared from the modern world. From the critical tradition: authority is always in danger of becoming a mask for power. From all of them: authority is essential to political order, but it is also the most fragile of political concepts.

Practical Application

The concept of authority is central to debates about the legitimacy of government, the role of expertise in public life, and the authority of law. When we ask whether a law is legitimate, we are asking whether the authority that issued it has the right to do so. When we ask whether experts should have authority over policy, we are asking about the limits of expertise in democratic decision-making. The question — what is authority? — is therefore a practical question about the foundations of political order.