Authority and Democracy

100 Pages·2009·2.329 MB·English

by  April Carter

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:

POLITICAL SCIENCE

AUTHORITY AND

DEMOCRACY
AUTHORITY AND
DEMOCRACY
By
APRILCARTER
Volume 5
First published 1979
This edition first published in 2010
by Routledge
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©1979 April Carter
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ISBN 10: 0-415-49111-8 (Set)
ISBN 13: 978-0-415-49111-2 (Set)
ISBN 10: 0-415-55535-3 (Volume 5)
ISBN 13: 978-0-415-55535-7 (Volume 5)
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Authority
and
Democracy
April Carter
Somerville College, Oxford
Routledge & Kegan Paul
London, Henley and Boston
First published in 1979
by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd
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London WCJ E 7D D,
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© April Carter 1979
No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form without permission/rom the
publisher, except for the quotation ofb rief
passages in criticism.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Carter, April
Authority and democracy
1 Authority
I Title
301.5' 92 JC571 78-40862
ISBN 0 7100 0090 1
Contents
Introduction 1
1 Authority in the Ancien Regime 4
2 Defining Authority 13
3 The Nature of Political Authority 26
4 Political Authority and Political Power 41
5 Authority in the Modern World 55
6 Authority and Revolution 72
Bibliography 92
Introduction
Authority is a concept central to social and political thought, and yet its
precise nature remains remarkably elusive. There are a number of
reasons for this elusiveness. One is the ambiguity and complexity of the
uses of the word in ordinary speech, indicated, for example, by the very
different connotations attached to the two adjectives associated with
authority: authoritative and authoritarian. A second source of ambiguity
is the fact that we apply the concept of authority to a number of very
different spheres of social activity: to the sphere of knowledge as well as
the sphere of politics; to relations in the family and school as well as the
factory or army; and both in novels and everyday life we recognize the
authority of a strong personality. Whether we regard all these forms of
authority as different manifestations of one quintessential type of social
relationship which we call authority, or whether we believe that political
authority is different in kind from authority in, for example, education
depends in part on our broader understanding of politics and society.
One of the most fundamental disagreements between theorists of
authority is whether authority, like religious faith and tradition, was part
of a world we have now almost wholly lost, leaving the contemporary
world with a crisis of authority; or whether authority has changed its
accoutrements but still exists in modern form in modern industrialized
and rationalist society. Sociologists and political theorists who espouse
the first view turn their gaze to the aristocratic order of Europe prior to
the French Revolution, when social life was governed primarily by
deference to hierarchy, by custom and by unreflecting prejudice. Robert
Nisbet elaborates on the picture of this society delineated by nineteenth
century social theorists in his book The Sociological Tradition. The most
celebrated exponent of the second point of view is Max Weber, who
accepted the importance of tradition as a source of authority but looked
for an alternative type of authority, and alternative grounds for it, in the
modern bureaucratic state in an increasingly rationalist world.
2 INfRODUCfiON
Interpretations of authority necessarily vary with the political
philosophy of the writer. A preliminary distinction can be made between
conservative theorists, who have always tended to uphold existing forms
of authority and to maintain the necessity of authority for social stability
and the preservation of a civilized mode of life; and liberal, socialist and
anarchist theorists, who view authority with varying degrees of distrust.
Liberal rationalists see authority usurping the individual right to
autonomous thought and decision, socialists see authority as an
ideological gloss on the injustice of class rule, and anarchists usually see
all forms of authority as a source of social corruption. Radicals in
general have associated authority with authoritarian control which
minimizes personal freedom : the fact that our predominant image of
authority comes from the hierarchy of a traditional and aristocratic type
of society reinforces the reactionary connotations of the idea of
authority.
There are good reasons to suspect the exercise of authority in the
contemporary world. If authority is defined, as it often is, as a
relationship in which those in authority can evoke automatic and
unthinking obedience, then there have been numerous occasions when
the plea of obedience to orders has been used to justify the most terrible
crimes. A recent well-known psychological experiment, described by
Stanley Milgram in a book entitled Obedience to Authority, demonstrated
how an alarming number of participants in the experiment obeyed
orders to give electric shocks to individuals, even when they believed
that these shocks were causing great pain and could be lethal. There are
also good reasons to suspect the calls for the reassertion of authority
which are evoked by fears of widespread political revolt, of increasing
crime statistics and of the breakdown of accepted morality among the
young. Calls for more authority, whether in the home, the school, the
university, the factory or the state, usually disguise the desire to enforce
obedience and to impose stern discipline in order to stop permissiveness
and anarchy undermining the social order.
There is, however, a serious conservative case for authority which is
far removed from a crude recourse to authoritarianism, and which
emphasizes the role of authority in upholding not only moral and
intellectual standards but also in guaranteeing social and political
freedom, and acting as a barrier to centralized, arbitrary and despotic
power. This case is argued in three recent contributions to political
theory - Hannah Arendt's essay on Authority in her book Between Past
and Future, Carl Friedrich's study of Tradition and Authority and Robert
Nisbet's reflections on The Twilight of Authority - although each
elaborates a slightly different conception of authority. All three writers
are in some sense conservative, though this label obscures as much as it
illuminates. If all are hostile to radical egalitarianism and to the Marxist
tradition, each has sympathy with aspects of progressivism: Arendt's
belief that true politics is exemplified in direct democracy and heroic
INTRODUCfiON 3
action makes her responsive to certain styles of revolutionary politics ;
Friedrich has a liberal faith in reason; and Nisbet is sympathetic to the
pluralist version of anarchism propounded by Proudhon and K.ropotkin.
All pose a challenge to radicals prepared to dismiss the question of
authority as irrelevant.
It is arguable that radicals should not be less interested in the nature
and role of authority than conservatives, but more so. The problem of
authority is a problem for radicals precisely because they are committed
to change; they need to ask whether and in what spheres it is possible to
dispense with authority altogether and to consider the peculiar
difficulties of trying to create new forms of authority. Furthermore the
very nature of authority, if it is defined as the ability to evoke purely
voluntary compliance, suggests its importance to anyone interested in
how to preserve social peace without recourse to violence.
This book is conceived both as a dialogue with Arendt, Friedrich and
Nisbet about the nature and implications of authority and as a series of
provisional reflections on the possible forms of authority, its importance
for various spheres of social and political activity, and the problems of
maintaining or re-creating authority after social change or political
revolution.