Authority Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This example Authority Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

Defining political authority is a useful exercise for it raises the central problems of political theory. There is therefore no easy way to discuss authority without encountering important controversy. Rather than supply a settled definition of authority, what follows discusses the central questions that such an attempt inevitably raises.

Defining Politics

To understand political authority, it is necessary first to try to define politics. The most influential modern definition described the modern state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Weber 2004). Weber sought to define politics in a purely descriptive, value-free manner. Notice that the state has authority not just because it has a monopoly of violence, but because its monopoly is claimed, successfully, to be legitimate. There seems to be a difference, intuited by most, between genuine authority and mere force. Where genuine authority obliges us, force alone merely compels. But what adds legitimacy to force, and turns it into authority? What’s the difference between authoritative force and merely successful force? Weber abstains from giving legitimacy value-content. Legitimacy may be viewed in many ways, but the state, as a state, is successful in advancing its claim to it, whatever that claim may be. Legitimate force is force that has succeeded in advancing its claim to legitimacy. This applies, therefore, to force that has merely succeeded in controlling minds as well as bodies. But this means that, in Weber’s terms, authority is power, or rather, that there is no intelligible content to authority, if by authority we seek something other than power that has managed to mobilize or indoctrinate.

Authority And Justice

To understand authority beyond mere power, we enter the world of normative political theory. If we try to avoid normative issues by defining authority in terms of a political process, we are faced with having to ground our choice of process. Do we require that authority be legitimated by democratic, rather than nondemocratic processes? Why? We immediately find a value-judgment, a view of justice, operating as a hidden premise: Authority must be democratic, for democracy is just. Claims about what counts as genuine authority are conceptually inseparable from claims about justice.

To investigate authority is to investigate justice, about which there is a distinguished history of ideas. Rather than attempt a survey here, it may be useful to suggest, as a preview of such a survey, one point of comparison that sheds light on the question of authority. The following presentation is meant to be highly provisional, an invitation to first steps.

Arguments about justice, and therefore genuine authority, are often grounded in assertions about the purpose of government. Justice means accomplishing a particular end, which then defines the nature of authority and its limits. For example, the purpose of Socrates’ utopian city in The Republic appears to be the greatest possible fulfillment of the basic human types consistent with the greatest possible harmony of the types with each other. To create and manage a city that accomplishes this, he argues, a ruler is needed who has the greatest possible wisdom about human types, their fulfillment and education, and their relations to each other. This ruler also needs tremendous power in the areas of education and procreation. True authority, then, has to combine these particular powers with this particular wisdom: a philosopher-king. Both his particular wisdom (about the human good) and these particular powers (to turn individuals into harmonious fellow citizens) are necessary to achieve the city’s purpose, which defines justice. Only this union of power and wisdom then, embodied in a philosopher-king, has genuine authority. It is precisely in the avowed unlikelihood of such a union that Plato’s subtle subversion of all actual political authority consists.

Social Contract Theory

For social contract theorists, power becomes authority not only by virtue of the purpose it serves, but by virtue of its origin in consent. The premise of all social contract theory is natural equality, variously understood. For Hobbes, we are equally vulnerable to violent death, for example, while for Locke we are equal in our authority over ourselves, but in both cases equality means that no one has natural authority over others. Authority must be created, by agreement among equals, and this necessitates a social contract. Legitimate authority is merely conventional, but created on natural grounds (our equality), and for the sake of natural ends (our survival and prosperity, for example). A particular kind of convention, then, is necessary for power to have genuine authority.

Once the requirement of free consent has been satisfied, the scope and nature of authority is determined, again, by the purpose for which the contract was created. The purpose of government for Hobbes is safety; authority is created to impose peace on a violently competitive state of nature. The sovereign power can justly claim authority only if it can achieve its purpose, and the powers that are inherent to its authority are all those that are necessary for doing so. Hobbes’s sovereign is justly absolute—just authority must be understood to be unlimited—for only absolute power can ensure the safety of the commonwealth. Safety is near the heart of Locke’s view of the purpose of government—protection of life, liberty, and estate—but he argues that, given the dangers of tyranny, safety can only be ensured through limited government. Locke’s authority is justly limited, because the purpose of government makes such limits necessary. Should government overstep those limits, it oversteps its authority, because in overstepping its limits it vitiates the purpose for which it was created, in the name of which the citizens gave their consent. Early liberal thought is about further articulating those limits and their institutional consequences (e.g., separation of powers, Bill of Rights).

The Anti-Liberal Critique

For anti-liberal thinkers such as Marx (and to a lesser extent, Rousseau) it is the absence of a natural purpose for politics, and the injustice of its actual purposes, that destroys the claim to authority of modern regimes. For Marx, the state is the handmaiden of the exploiting class and can have no genuine author ity. Politics is the appropriation of the monopoly of violence for class warfare. There can be no political justice, and therefore no political authority. Justice begins when class exploitation, and with it politics and the modern state, ends; the natural or authentic end of our species, species-being, is antithetical to the historical ends of politics. For Nietzsche, finally, there are no natural ends of any kind, therefore no justice or genuine authority, nor injustice or genuine oppression. There is only will to power. Power often masquerades as authority, and the struggle to define authority by defining justice is a principal arena of the struggle for power. In Nietzsche we see the fullest development of the implications hinted at in Weber, and expounded at length in Machiavelli, that authority is merely successful power.

Bibliography:

Hamilton, Alexander, John Jay, James Madison, and Clinton Rossiter. The Federalist Papers, edited by Charles R. Kesler. New York: Signet Classics, 2003.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, edited by Edwin Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994.
Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government, edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince, translated by Harvey Mansfield Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “The Communist Manifesto.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Robert C.Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978.
Mill, John Stuart. “On Liberty” and Other Writings, edited by Stefan Collini. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Montesquieu, Charles. The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought), edited by Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1966.
The Republic of Plato, translated and edited by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1991.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice: Original Edition. New York: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Basic Political Writings, translated and edited by Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987.
Weber, Max. The Vocation Lectures: Science as a Vocation, Politics as a Vocation, edited by David S. Owen and Tracy B. Strong, translated by Rodney Livingstone. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004