The Notion of Authority. Alexandre Kojève

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ to Arendt, Greco-Roman tradition, extended and relayed by Christianity, has transmitted a concept that rests on the combination of three components: tradition, religion, and authority. At the same time, its history has been marked during recent centuries by the disappearance of tradition and the loss of religion. More stable, and yet fatally undermined in its very foundations, authority is also destined to disappear, even though its disappearance is only that of a ‘very specific form which had been valid throughout the Western World over a long period of time’. It is for this reason that ‘practically as well as theoretically, we are no longer in a position to know what authority really is’. Arendt adds that ‘the answer to this question cannot possibly lie in a definition of the nature or essence of “authority in general”.’²¹

      However, this is exactly where the rest of her argument unintentionally leads; and it is here that an expectation is revealed which is more or less conscious and to which Kojève’s argument now responds. What lies at the origin of this tradition in decline, which offers, after all, and despite its vicissitudes, an ideal type born from a lasting conjunction in which tradition, religion, and authority converge? The premonitory signs are to be found, once again, in Greek philosophy. If authority necessarily goes hand-in-hand with the obedience that it always requires, it nevertheless does not exclude constraint or persuasion, which, when used, both render authority useless. In this particular strand of universal history, authority is something else. Plato saw this when he drew on the relations between the shepherd and his flock, the steersman and the passengers on a ship, or on the doctor–patient relationship. However, it is in Rome, in the sacred foundation of the city, the house and the home, that ‘the word and concept of authority’ are to be found.²²

      This return to Roman law constituted already, through the expansion it entailed, a valuable addition to previous studies by classicists, including those who did not believe it possible to ‘reduce the different juridical aspects of the notion of auctoritas to a unifying concept’.²³ On the side of private law, it is by virtue of his auctoritas that the father or the guardian – auctor derived from augere (increase) – exerts his authority: ‘whether it authorises, or whether it ratifies, it supposes a foreign activity which it validates’.²⁴ It is ‘an attribute related to the individual, and originally to the physical person … the privilege, the right, belonging to a Roman in prescribed conditions to serve as foundation for the juridical situation created by others’.²⁵ In the context of Roman public law, at the time of the Law of the Twelve Tables, towards the middle of the fifth century BCE, the Roman people secured a role in the res publica and the making of law. For a long time, however, laws had to be ratified by the patrician senators in order to obtain the auctoritas patrum. Auctoritas subsequently became a preliminary senatorial agreement, before it developed into mere opinion, though laws were passed only rarely against the view of the Senate.²⁶ This visible reduction promoted the rise of the notion of authority in line with its etymology, in such a way that an increase in the very foundation of religion and the city parallels the augmentation of the mystical and sacred foundation of authority! In a way, it is for this reason that it remains distinct from both imperium and potestas. As Mommsen explains, it is ‘less than an order and more than advice’.²⁷ It is that which does not imply constraint in order to be heard or obeyed; on the contrary, it is the ‘force which confers legitimacy’,²⁸ which ‘seems to act as a force that suspends potestas where it took place and reactivates it where it was no longer in force’.²⁹ Its legacy would be revisited a long time later, when Max Weber linked charismatic power to the concept of auctoritas and the Führerprinzip doctrine.

      Frequently, the author expresses the modesty of his ambitions, contenting himself here and there with tracing general outlines for further development. No less frequently does he use, in an enlightening manner, the infinite resources of punctuation, resorting to capital letters, parentheses, footnotes, consistently observed throughout the text, to present an outline of the notion of authority, both on the basis of and beyond the four irreducible theories proposed in the course of history – besides the theological theory, there are those of Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel. Kojève’s argument is organised in terms of analyses followed by their concrete application.

      The first and most important analysis, with which Kojève begins, is the phenomenological one – an approach that those who are familiar with his Outline of a Phenomenology of Right will not find surprising. From the outset, the author follows a holistic approach. As a social phenomenon, ‘Authority is the possibility that an agent has of acting on others (or on another), without these others reacting against him, despite being capable of doing so.’ ‘By acting with Authority, the agent can change the outward human given without suffering a repercussion from such action, i.e. without himself changing as a result of his action.’ Clarification: ‘If, in order to make someone get out of my room, I have to use force, I have to change my own behaviour to realize the act in question, and I show through this behaviour that I have no authority.’ A consequence of this is the isolation of the notion of authority, which ‘excludes force, [whereas] right implies and presupposes force while being something different from it.’ Necessarily ‘recognised’ by its subjects, ‘every human Authority that exists must have a ‘cause’, a ‘reason’ or a ‘justification’ for its existence, a raison d’être’. In other terms, why is it consciously and willingly recognised, endured without reaction? What is this authority?

      The phenomenological approach consists in setting out facts and then indicating the result without providing any proof, properly speaking, to demonstrate them. This leads Kojève to distinguish four types that are ‘simple, pure or elementary’: authority of the father over the child, of the master over the slave, of the leader over the gang, and of the judge over the person or persons he judges. Various kinds of authority are subsequently linked to the four pure ones. For example: to the authority of the father, that of tradition; to the authority of the master, that of the nobility; to the authority of the leader, that of the boss; to the authority of the judge, that of the confessor, and so on. This shows that there can exist mixed authorities that can pertain to several types.

      Coming back to the four philosophies mentioned above, Kojève notes their correspondence to four pure types of authority. That of the master is in line with Hegel’s thought and with the relation between master and slave, which is, apparently, considered a ‘general theory of authority’, even though it does not account for the authority of the father, leader, or judge types. Following Aristotle, another type of authority becomes central – that of the leader who is more apt than others to foresee, who is more intelligent and intuitive; the leader is he who conceives of a project and who guides and commands. Platonic thought is again different, every authority being founded, or needing to be founded, on justice or equity. In this respect, it is the authority of the judge that is central and exclusive. Thus, it is ‘the claim to impartiality, objectivity, disinterestedness, and so on, that always gives rise to an authority’. Similarly, the ‘“just” or “honest” man possesses an unquestionable authority, even if he does not hold the position of an arbiter’. The scholastic or theocratic theory, itself having a universal and exclusive dimension, corresponds to the authority of the father, which is in reality, like the three other types of authority, endowed with a divine essence because its authority is derived from God via the transmission of hereditary essence. ‘God the Father’, ‘our Father which art in heaven’ considered as ‘creator of man and the world’, ‘“Father of men” because he has effectively “engendered” them by “creating” them (ex nihilo).’

      Despite the fact that each of these philosophical theories aspires to exclusivity, none of them manages, according to Kojève, to account for the four pure types of authority. This line of analysis leads him to take for granted the plural aspect of authority. Consequently, all controversies ensuing from the dominating tendencies are repressed. And it should not be forgotten that the retained typology, reminiscent of Weber’s theory of ideal types, does not exclude in any way the possibility of multiple СКАЧАТЬ