Reframing Authority. The Role of Media and Materiality. Equinox, London, 2018. Co-edited with Christian Høgel (original) (raw)
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This volume brings together the papers presented at a confer- ence held at the Fondazione Adriano Olivetti, March 19-20, 2004. The topic of the conference – the concept of authority – lent itself particularly well to its multi-disciplinary approach. Different forms of authority play decisive roles, and ought to be examined not only in the political sphere but also in the areas of social relations more generally and education. Organized collective life would be impossible without forms of authority, however legitimate. It is thus difficult to imagine constructing a shared knowledge without thinking critically about “authority,” even though we simultaneously need it to focus our criticism. Without authority, knowledge itself would become completely subjective, unstructured, incommunicable and unable to build upon itself. From the cognitive sciences to political and legal philosophy, the subject discussed in this volume remains one of the most fascinating areas of research and analysis in the humanities.
Authority's Hidden Network: Obligations, Roles and the Morphogenesis of Authority
The purpose of this paper is to examine how the morphogenesis of authority presupposes, and in turn constitutes, social roles and relations of obligation. Authority is conceptualised as a relation of power based on legitimacy. The latter is in turn analysed both in terms of rights and of obligations. Such a perspective emphasises the import of identities and, in particular, social identities and social roles in the morphogenesis of relations of authority. Moreover, it will be argued that those relations of authority that are observable in any given organisation are themselves rooted in a wider-and typically neglected-network of (significant) others whose expected attitudes are commonly used as a compass for agents engaging in relations of authority. The first Sect. 10.1 offers a critical exegesis of the classic works of Max Weber on authority. It also presents the main features of my approach in contradistinction with Weber's. Authority, it is argued, is not merely a situation in which the will manifested by the ruler influences the conduct of others. If anything, it is first and foremost a circular relation of power whose legitimacy is recognised by participants. Section 10.2 focuses on the logical and ontological links between legitimacy , rights and obligations. It questions whether and how legitimacy can be reformulated in terms of obligations and vice versa. Authority thus appears to be a relation of power entailing an obligation to refrain from negating it. This does not mean that authority is unquestionable but rather that a relation of authority will first be questioned on those aspects which seem less unquestionably legitimate than others. Moreover, such questioning of authority must mobilise other, more
This article theorizes authority from sociological and normative perspectives. It opens with the work of Weber, Arendt and Raz. This is followed by a sociological analysis of authority as a capacity for action, power-to and power-over, which are linked to felicitous performative action within epistemic interpretative horizons. Normatively, it confronts the anarchist challenge that authority is inimical to freedom by distinguishing between dispositional and episodic power. Bureaucratic and political power-over authority is theorized as normatively defensible when it confers dispositional power-to. This article concludes by discussing the mismatch between sociological authority, as a social fact, and normatively desirable authority: how the practices of charismatic, bureaucratic and democratic authority are often normatively problematic.