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CONCEPTS OF AUTHORITY, POWER AND
LEGITIMACY
URL: http://www.spatialgovernance.com/governance/gov-01A.htm
© John S. Cook - Created on 14 July 2004
Last modified
05/04/11 11:01
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THE NEED FOR CONCEPTUAL CLARITY |
Distinguishing Between Thought and
Action
The terms 'authority' and 'power' are closely related; mainly because
those in authority to say what should happen are often able also to
initiate actions to make those things happen. The idea of 'can do'
implies 'know how' and is bound up in the
etymology of
the verb 'can'. (This is further illustrated in the word 'canny' -
meaning 'knowing', 'sagacious', 'shrewd' or 'astute' whereas 'uncanny'
refers to the supernatural or unknowable.) There is thus a tendency to
blur any distinction between thought and action through slogans such as
'knowledge is power' and ideas about how education can empower people
socially and economically.The distinction between 'thought'
and action' - or stimulus and response; or mind and muscle - is useful
in analysing issues affecting individuals and organisations. Thus,
reasons that something may not get done could include:
 | one or more individuals not having the necessary
range of knowledge and skills to perform a task |
| inability to communicate and coordinate people
having different knowledge, skills, vocabulary and language |
| absence of motivation in individuals |
| incompatible motivations within groups that lead
people to be at 'cross purposes' |
| paralysis at the level of an individual or an
organisation where ideas do not transform into motor responses or
actions |
| lack of command over resources (including time)
necessary to perform tasks |
Obviously, effecting remedies for organisational
failures and inefficiencies depends on accurate diagnosis. Moreover,
the variety of remedies that may be needed depends on the variety of
things that might malfunction. (This alludes to a cybernetic concept of
'requisite variety'.) Arguably, there are advantages in separating
information-intensive activities from those that involve the use of
energy. |
Information and Energy
A considerable amount of information intensive
activity occurs within an individual - both consciously and
unconsciously. This activity is generally recognisable in sensory
organs, the human brain and nervous system. However, it also extends
into continuing cell replication throughout the lives of living
organisms as well as in the genetic inheritance passed on to progeny.
Thus, information activity is a necessary condition - but insufficient
in itself - for coordinating (or controlling, or managing) the use of
human energy in motor activity.Breakdowns in communication are likely to result in loss of
coordination. At the level of an individual, such loss in coordination
can occur in:
| hesitancy where people may be 'of two minds' or
ambivalent about something |
| confused signals or messages - as in epilepsy or
in cardiac arrhythmias |
Modern social, economic and political systems also
require high levels of coordination, especially with attempts at
democratisation and globalisation. Understanding the communication
processes that are necessary to achieve coordination are critical in
understanding the potential for success in many undertakings.
Summary
A clear distinction can be drawn between thought and action, just as it
is possible to distinguish clearly between concepts of 'authority' (with
its links to information) and 'power' (with its links to a potential for
action). Word usage is a matter of social convention and some users of
these terms seem to recognise the distinction implicitly. However, other
users may not be careful in indicating what they mean with sufficient
precision to promote clearer understandings. Notwithstanding these
terminological difficulties, the distinction is of considerable
practical significance in analysing social, economic and political
situations. |
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'AUTHORITY' AS A CONCEPT |
Usage and Meanings of
"Authority'
People have authority when what they say goes. Thus, if one person can
persuade or coerce one or more other persons to do as suggested or as
they are told, then the first person exercises a degree of persuasive or
coercive authority over those other persons.
Persuasive Authority
One person's ability to persuade other people might result from
perceptions - real or imagined - regarding his or her knowledge about a
matter in question. Perceptions regarding a person's knowledge might
arise from:
| associations with successful endeavours or outcomes |
| work done or positions held that suggest or imply a
need for particular knowledge or skills |
| ability to inspire confidence resulting from a
genuinely charismatic personality, or through bluff and pretence of
knowledge |
The link between persuasion and inspiring confidence
is also evident in Weber's typology of 'authority' as deriving from
tradition, legal/rational principles or charisma. The credibility given
to tried and tested information is inherent in the appeal to tradition:
to reason in legal/rational principles: and to personality in charisma. |
Authority and Competence
Ultimately, persuasive authority depends on
perceptions of competence, correctness and rectitude in
information and advice. Such authority diminishes or disappears if it
becomes associated with undesirable outcomes or outright failures.
Similarly, coercive authority depends on being
able to obtain the political support of sufficient numbers to overcome
any opposing force that might arise. Retaining such political support
depends ultimately on competent leadership, at least in the eyes of a
sufficient number of followers.Influence
Conceptually, 'influence' has links with persuasive authority and
learning. 'Influence' brings about altered attitudes or states of mind
and may lead to changes in behaviour. The things occur either through written or spoken words; or through the example set by a
person who is a role model for other people. Learning
might mean acquiring new knowledge - something that a person did not
know previously. Alternatively, it might mean new evidence that
challenges previously held viewpoints and leads to people changing their minds about something.
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SOURCES OF
INSTITUTIONALIZED AUTHORITY AND RESPONSIBILITY |
Official Authority
A person might become
an 'authority' by being appointed – or elected, anointed or ‘authorised’ –
under an institutional arrangement that involves a latent capacity to
coerce another person to do what they are told. As an example, police, judicial
officers and various public officials have direct authority under the
law to require obedience to their decisions and directions.
Authority, Answerability and Responsibility
The authority to say what goes may be hard to sustain if the advice,
orders or directions lead to undesirable outcomes. Responsibility
implies the making of some attempt to ameliorate the effects of those
undesirable outcomes. Answerability implies the offering of some
explanation of what has happened and why.
Parental Authority
Parental authority is essential to the
well-being of children who have not yet acquired sufficient knowledge
and skills to fend for themselves. In progressing towards adolescence
and adulthood, the person usually acquires greater capacity for self
control. Here, self-control means avoiding antisocial behaviour.
institutional arrangements allow authority for the care of individual
children through legal guardianship, foster parenting or as state wards.
Political, Religious and Scientific Authority
Many aspects of governance - as well as major upheavals in the history
of human affairs - derive from an interplay within and between
political, religious and scientific sources of authority.
| political - leadership in opinion within a
community concerning how people will be governed |
| religious - an influence supposedly deriving from a
superhuman or ultimate authority regarding the cosmos, |
| scientific - deriving from reason and observation
about the cosmos and the part that humans play in that cosmos |
Compounding this complexity, is a profusion of ideas
about the world as it is, as people perceive it, as people would like it
to be, as people think that it can be, and a world as people think that
it ought to be.
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Institutionalized Authority in Commerce
Trade and commerce depends on a regime of formal
and informal understandings concerning property, contracts and various
rights and duties that constitute the institutions of trade and
commerce. The rights and duties vest in natural and artificial
persons. Larger commercial entities are usually corporations (or
artificial persons) where there is some separation between ownership of
shareholders, authority in boards of directors and control over
resources vested in the executive. Legal Authority
The notion of legal authority has a specialised meaning within the law.
A statute can give authority to a particular person or office by
indicating what they 'must' do or 'may' do. 'Must' indicates that
something is mandatory whereas 'may' indicates that something is
allowable at the discretion of an official in question.
The notion of legal
authority has another shade of meaning within the common law. The
'commonality' that is a feature of the common law depends on similar
cases being decided similarly. Accordingly, precedent becomes authority
for future decisions. Moreover, the nature of the appeal process is that
a superior court can overturn the decision of a lower court. Therefore,
considerable authority attaches to precedent established within a
superior court. An exception occurs in the case of the highest court in
the land where there is no superior court. Such a court may not be bound
absolutely by its own precedent
Authority and Obedience
Generally, respect for and obedience to just and decent laws is a
precondition for social order and good government. This raises moral
issues of how it can be decided that laws are 'just and decent' and
whether a person is morally justified in disobeying authority perceived
as unjust and indecent.
Obedience to inhumane directions was a feature of Nazi
atrocities against Jews during the Second World War. This raises a question of
the 'legitimacy' of a regime and the circumstances under which
international intervention becomes justifiable. |
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CONFLICTING AUTHORITY |
Vector Attributes of
Information
Official orders - or other forms of authoritative information - can give
direction to ensuing actions. Thus, information has the attributes of a
vector in leading to a particular magnitude or force operating in a
particular direction. Direction may be lost if an order is ambiguous,
since forces may cancel each other out and produce a stalemate. This can
occur if two or more
sources give
contradictory information and generate forces in opposing directions.
While different people may have different attitudes
towards a single thing, it is also possible for a single person to have
conflicting or ambivalent attitudes on a single issue. Love/hate
relationships exemplify ambivalence and they are common with
relationships involving power and authority. Relationships between
employers and employees; parents and adolescent children; and between
people and government are examples where love/hate relationships are
common occurrences. Similarly, ambivalence occurs in matters of head and
heart - where reason suggests one thing but more immediate emotional
satisfactions may suggest something else.
Implications for Democratic Institutions
Authority in democratic government depends on a majority vote to
allocate the resources needed to govern. Where society itself is
sufficiently divided to leave no clear majority, the processes of
democratic government become unstable and a breakdown in law and order
becomes more likely.
Abraham Lincoln used the expression - 'A house divided against itself
cannot stand' - in a speech in 1858 that preceded a particularly
destructive civil war. The Biblical expression of this idea appears in
Mathew 12: 25-26 - 'Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to
desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not
stand'.
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Contradictions,
Rationalizations and Ideologies
A person may have a contradictory attitude about something without
necessarily being aware of the contradiction. Thus a student might
believe him- or herself to be quite clever; but this might be hard to
reconcile with failure in examinations. The psychological mechanisms of
self-defence might seek excuses rather than accept real reasons for the
failure. This can occur through denial of some information or evidence;
or convoluted reasoning processes. Where this kind of rationalization
becomes mutually reinforced within a group of individuals whose
circumstances are much the same, it becomes ideological in character.
Fromm summed up the rationalizing processes thus:
| It is one of the peculiar
qualities of the human mind that, when confronted with a
contradiction, it cannot remain passive. It is set in motion with
the aim of resolving the contradiction. All human progress is due
to this fact. If man is to be prevented from reacting to his
awareness of contradictions by action, the very existence of these
contradictions must be denied. To harmonize, and thus negate,
contradictions is the function of rationalizations in individual
life and of ideologies (socially patterned rationalizations) in
social life.[ 1 ]
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On moral issues, contradictory attitudes - such as
differences between what a person says and how they actually behave -
can become an hypocrisy, especially if the person persists even though
being fully aware of the contradiction. |
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IMPLICATIONS OF CONFLICTING AUTHORITY IN
GOVERNMENT |
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Problems of Conflicting Authority
Being told two different things and making up one's mind on what
to believe is a common form of enquiry in everyday life, and more
formally in official enquiries such as in courts of law. However,
a problem emerges if it is a source of authority in the style of a
rule of law that people are supposed to obey. Obedience to one
form of authority may come at the expense of disobedience to
another - and authorities may try to exact some form of penalty
for disobedience. Historically, three forms of authority have led
to significant social tensions when they conflict:
| the law of god or religious authority - the natural order of things as
evidenced in scripture - though subject to various
interpretations from time to time and according to what people
may be prepared to see |
| the laws of man or secular authority -
the organisation of society according to secular authorities
according to various power relationships
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| the laws of nature or scientific
authority - a perception of what is possible or
what is best based on science - where the penalty of trying to
do what is seen as scientifically unsound is some form of
failure, supposedly predictable |
Religious Authority
Historically, religious authorities in the Judeo-Christian
tradition have sometimes coalesced and sometimes conflicted with
secular authorities. Moreover, church authorities have relied on
internal power relationships to the problems and have included:
| competing claims in rights to taxation |
| claims regarding a divine right to rule |
| conflict within religious authority regarding
rights to interpret scripture - evidenced in the historical
period of the Reformation movement |
Generally, trying to reach some settlement
between secular and religious authority has involved:
| a constitutional separation of church and
state |
| constitutional safeguards regarding freedom
of religion |
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Secular Authority
Secular authority can have conflicts from within as well as
conflicts with religious and scientific authorities. The conflict
within comes mainly from gaining control over the resources to
govern through taxation. Thus the evolution and gradual shift of
power to the House of Commons in the United Kingdom demonstrates
the problem and a resolution.
Tensions still arise between church and secular
authorities over 'matters of conscience' - social security,
policies affecting families, abortion and public morality
generally. However, church authorities have a right to influence
but not to decide these issues if democratic principles are to
remain intact.
Scientific Authority
A secular authority that denies scientific knowledge that is known
to be reliable invites trouble because their policies are likely
to be unworkable on scientific grounds. Thus, policies affecting
human behaviour generally have underpinnings - in areas such as
economics, criminal and deviant rehabilitation, and social
conditions. Similarly, policies affecting natural resources and
the environment have underpinnings in agricultural sciences,
forestry, and ecological sciences more generally. However,
shortcomings or conflicts within science can lead to political
tensions - as in the search for policy directions during the Great
Depression through shortcomings in economic theory. Similar
problems may arise where scientific knowledge is tentative and the
economic consequences one way or another are significant.
Tensions
between Religious and Scientific Authorities
Tensions arose between religion and science with the growth of
scientific knowledge because science was incompatible in many
respects with literal interpretation of scripture in whatever
version or translation it appeared. |
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ANONYMOUS, UNQUESTIONABLE AND INCOMPETENT AUTHORITY |
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The Nature of Anonymous Authority
Tennyson makes a succinct
description of an anonymous, incompetent and unquestionable authority in
the following passage from The Charge of the Light Brigade:
Someone had blundered:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die; |
Tennyson's account of an ill-fated cavalry charge at
Balaclava on 25 October 1854 during the Crimean War captured public
imagination in Britain. Historians usually regard the Crimean War as the
first war to be observed directly and reported in the media by
journalists and photographers. While Tennyson's account contains
contain considerable poetic license; but it does provide a succinct
description of a scenario where a code of strict military discipline
means that soldiers have no right to question their orders. Nor do
soldiers have any opportunity to assess the rationale under orders are given.
In effect, the soldier's duty was to be prepared to die for a cause -
usually someone else's cause.
The reference to 'someone' implies someone unknown or
nameless. This has parallels where people express grievances against ‘the
system’, ‘the establishment’ or ‘the powers-that-be’. The source of
authority is anonymous and therefore lacks an address to which a
grievance can be addressed. The inability to address a grievance also
means that it has little chance of redress.
Assertions made often enough without contradiction may
gain a ‘ring of truth’ and become accepted as authority or 'conventional
wisdom'.
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A particular feature of anonymous authority |
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References:
| Google search - charge of the light brigade -
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AUTHORITY AND RESPONSIBILITY |
| The notion of 'sustainable human
development' |
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POWER AND CONTROL |
| Generally, power implies a release of energy and
control implies an ability to harness energy to achieve some purpose. |
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LEGITIMACY |
The Notion of Legitimacy
'Legitimacy' has connotations of social and moral acceptance about what
is fair and righteous. Where people have a general respect for laws of
the land, the adjective 'legitimate' might be used to qualify terms such
as 'government', and 'authority' when used in relation to the
legislature, the judiciary and official public positions. Similarly, an
employer might be seen as exercising legitimate authority in hiring and
firing personnel. |
Legitimacy and Legality
It is an unfortunate distraction to blur distinction between what is
legal - and what is legitimate in a moral sense. Is there morality in
blind obedience to a law that a person does not agree with?
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References:
| Murray Gleeson, Chief Justice, High Court of
Australia, 'Judicial
Legitimacy', Australian Bar Association Conference, New York, (2
July 2000) |
| Centre for Independent Studies -
Home >
Events >
John Bonython
Lectures > Robert Kagan, 'America
and the World: The Crisis of Legitimacy',
Sydney, NSW,
(9
November 2004) |
| Google Search -
legitimacy |
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