Authority

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What is authority?
Article in Journal of Classical Sociology · August 2017

DOI: 10.1177/1468795X17723737
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What is authority?
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DOI: 10.1177/1468795X17723737
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Mark Haugaard
National University of Ireland, Ireland
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Authority, bureaucracy, legitimacy, political power, political theory, sociological theory
The phenomenon of authority can be analysed from a number of perspectives. Most

notably, authority can be theorized empirically, using sociological theory; or norma-
tively, using political theory. It can also be analysed with reference to meaning in lan-
guage. While I pay some attention to what we mean by authority, this article is primarily
an exercise in sociological and normative theory.
As has been argued with regard to power (Haugaard, 2010), following Wittgenstein
(1967), different language games framed around specific academic theoretical quests
will deliver slightly different usages which are overlapping as family resemblance con-
cepts. In sociological theory, the orienting question is what is authority as a social phe-
nomenon? This entails analysing the social sources of legitimation of authority. In
normative political theory, we want to know what forms of authority are normatively
justified.
Corresponding author:
Mark Haugaard, School of Political Science and Sociology, Moyola Building, National University of Ireland,
Galway, Ireland.
Email: mark.haugaard@nuigalway.ie
2 Journal of Classical Sociology 00(0)
Both the sociological and the normative language games entail attention to the ques-
tion of legitimacy. However, the usage is different: in the sociological language game,
legitimacy refers to the actions and beliefs of social actors, while political theory tests
legitimacy with respect to the political theorist’s normative frame of reference. In this
article, we will analyse both approaches. In the case of the latter, the normative frame is
broadly characterized in terms of overlapping consensus that underpins the liberal and
republican democratic traditions.
In terms of structure, this article begins by framing the context which is a background
tradition for this theorization. This focuses upon three perspectives which are as follows:
Max Weber, whose analysis frames sociological theory; Hannah Arendt, who is both
sociological and normative, and whose essay ‘What is authority?’ inspired the title of this
article, and Joseph Raz, who is the most comprehensive liberal normative theorist of
authority. Other thinkers will also be discussed and are woven into the theorization,
which follows in the second half.
Three perspectives on authority

Max Weber
Weber’s perspective on authority was strictly sociological. As observed by Beetham
(1991), Weber argued that for a social scientist to say that power relations are legiti-
mate is
not to make a moral judgement about it in the manner of the philosopher; it is rather to make a
report (which may be empirically true or false) about other people’s beliefs. Power is legitimate
where those involved in it believe it to be so; legitimacy derives from people’s belief in
legitimacy. (p. 8)
Max Weber theorized authority within the context of his broader quest to understand
the tacit epistemic hermeneutical foundations of social order or Verstehen sociology. As
always in Weber’s work, there is an implicit dialogue with the ghost of Marx, whose mate-
rialist and class-based account of social order Weber considered one-dimensional. In addi-
tion to material factors, Weber argued that the shift from traditional society or feudalism
to capitalism occurred as a consequence of a change in the interpretative horizons of
social actors. Unlike in Marx, for Weber social hierarchies are sustained not simply by
material coercive class domination but also by ideas, perceptions, forms of reasoning,
emotional states and a broad social ontology that legitimates those hierarchies. While
classes are largely defined materially, status groups and authority (Herrschaft) have power
based upon ways of life and their rationalization.
Power (Macht) is a generalized phenomenon, while authority (Herrschaft) relates
more specifically to institutionalized command (Weber, 1978: 53, 212). According to
Weber (1978), ‘Power (Macht) is the probability that one actor within a social relation-
ship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the
basis upon which that probability rests’ (p. 53). This is a relational conception of power
which emphasizes agency in conflict. Later, this perspective formed the foundation of
Haugaard 3
Dahl’s (1957) formulation: ‘A has power over B to the extent to which A can get B to do
something that B would not otherwise do’ (pp. 202–203).
Weber’s words ‘regardless of the basis upon which that probability rests’ point us to
different sources of power (Macht) which are the following: coercion, discipline and
authority. The most obvious basis for power is coercion. Coercion entails either the
threat of violence (the sword) or the threat of material deprivation (economic sanction).
This form of power tends to be one-off or episodic. Thus, in structural terms it is not as
significant in complex societies. While Weber does not state this explicitly, it is assumed
that coercion is dominating from a normative perspective.
Weber (1978) lists discipline as a source of power (p. 53). This is theorized as reflex
action that is not cognitively evaluated thus neither coercive nor related to legitimation.
This anticipates some of the works of Foucault (1979, 1982) and the fourth-dimension of
power (Haugaard, 2012b) which lies beyond the scope of this article.
With regard to authority, Weber writes, as follows : ‘Authority (Herrschaft) is the
probability that a command with a given specific content will be obeyed by a given
group of persons’ (p. 53). The words specific content refers to the scope of authority. As
argued by Dahl (2002: 12–13), the scope of power of a university professor is not the
same as that of the traffic police. The former has authority power with regard to what
books the students read while the latter over where they park their cars.
Weber (1978) argued that commands of authority contain a ‘certain minimum of vol-
untary submission; thus an interest (based on ulterior motives or genuine acceptance) in
obedience’ (p. 212). This interest can either be purely practical, related to specific prag-
matic interests or from ‘the belief in its legitimacy’ (Weber, 1978: 213, italics added). The
belief that sustains authority is of greater theoretical interest to Weber than crude ulterior
motives as belief relates to the Verstehen sociological enterprise. Sociologically, perma-
nent relations of authority are sustained by the beliefs of the grantee of authority.
The various forms that the belief in legitimacy can take define the types of authority.
There are three ideal types of authority which are based upon Weber’s characterization
of different sources of validating legitimacy (legal rationality, value rationality, tradi-
tional action and affective action). They are as follows:
1. Rational grounds. ‘resting on a belief in the legality of normative rules’ (Weber,

1978: 215; legal authority);
2. Traditional grounds. ‘resting upon established belief in the sanctity of immemo-
rial traditions’ (Weber, 1978: 215; traditional authority);
3. Charismatic grounds. ‘resting upon devotion to the specific and exceptional
sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person …’ (Weber,
1978: 215; charismatic authority).
Oddly, while there are four types of action, there are only three forms of authority.
This is possibly because charismatic authority entails a fusion of two forms of action:
affective and value rational action. However, it is my sense that Weber’s list is not
intended to be definitive and does not preclude that there could be four or even more (see
Giddens, 1973: 156–157).
Weber’s (1904) classification of authority and their legitimation in social action are
ideal types, which means that most actual authority has elements of all three forms of
legitimation. To take an example, Barack Obama was elected President according to the
legal precepts of US Constitution (legal authority), yet he also had personal charismatic
qualities as a rhetorician (charismatic authority), while the office of the President has
become part of the taken-for-granted habituated reality of the citizens of the United
States over more than 200 years (traditional authority).
Weber observes that authority can be individual, such as the authority that a parent has
over a child. However, in complex societies, including ancient ones, authority entails a
specific position or office which is part of a complex chain of command. Each person in
that chain has specific power-over or capacities to issue commands based upon the scope
of power associated with the nature of the authority that goes with these different posi-
tions (Weber, 1978: 215).
To summarize, authority is a form of power that usually goes with an office or posi-
tion and, in addition, entails some level of consent by the grantee of authority based upon
a belief in legitimacy rooted in the specific rationalization of a given type of action. This
is an empirical sociological claim. Weber is interested primarily in the grantee social
actors’ belief in legitimacy rather than in the normative question of whether or not these
beliefs are defensible relative to the norms identified, and problematized by particular
scholars of political theory. For this reason, Weber did not tackle the issue of the dividing
line between the sociological fact of legitimate authority and the normative judgement
that some forms of sociologically legitimate authority are dominating.
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt (2006) begins her essay, ‘What is authority?’, by contrasting authority
with other social phenomena as follows:
Since authority always demands obedience, it is commonly mistaken for some form of power
or violence. Yet authority precludes the use of external means of coercion; where force is used,
authority itself has failed. Authority, on the other hand, is incompatible with persuasion, which
presupposes equality and works through a process of argumentation. (p. 92)
We should consider authority as an ideal type that is on two oppositional scales as

follows: (a) authority versus power/violence/coercion and (b) authority versus equality
and argumentation.
Arendt also considers power and violence as opposites. She writes,
politically speaking, it is insufficient to say that power and violence are opposites; where one
rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears when power is in jeopardy, but left to its
own course it ends in power’s disappearance. (Arendt, 1970: 56)
Just like authority, political power is not the equivalent of coercion or violence: they
are opposites. Consequently, in the affirmation that ‘[s]ince authority always demands
obedience, it is commonly mistaken for some form of power or violence’ (italics added).
Haugaard 5
Arendt is either using power in an everyday sense, according to which it can be equated
with violence/coercion or she is using the word or as difference rather than equivalence.
The sentence ‘authority precludes the use of external means of coercion’ (Arendt 2006:
92) suggests that she is using power in the manner of everyday speech in which power
tends to be equated with coercion. In short, Arendt conceives of power and authority as
distinct phenomena that are opposite to violence.
Authority ‘requires respect for the person or the office’ (Arendt, 1970: 45).
Consequently, authority is undermined by disrespect. Therefore, the greatest enemy of
authority ‘is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter’ (Arendt, 1970: 45).
Once some person (or an office) is held in contempt then the only source of compliance
is violence.
Drawing these elements together this can be summarized as follows:
1. Authority is the opposite of violence and coercion.

2. Authority is the opposite of argumentation.
3. Authority is the opposite of laughter.
4. Authority is related to power, but not equivalent to it.
5. Power is also the opposite of violence/coercion.
As in Weber, these social phenomena are ideal types. It is common to find them in
combination, but when combined they represent different sources of compliance and
agency and therefore often work against each other (see Arendt, 1970: 46–49).
Arendt argues that authority is undermined by the use of either coercion or argumen-
tation as source of power. Arendt uses the example of a parent–child relationship. A par-
ent has authority if their command is unquestioningly obeyed. In contrast, endless
discussion or threats of violence suggest that their authority has been lost or at least
undermined (Arendt, 1970: 45).
Arendt’s discussion of authority is linked to her view that authority was in decline at
the time of writing the essay. To restore authority, Arendt normatively endorses and
wishes to resurrect structures of authority based upon ancient Roman and Greek prece-
dent. As will be shown, these arguments are inconsistent with contemporary liberal and
republican democratic theory and would not find resonance in contemporary society
(echoing the old sociological dictum that society is not like a street car that can be stopped
and then reversed). I will only briefly outline them, mainly for their insight into her
understanding of the empirical nature of authority and to highlight some normative
issues relevant to my own perspective below.
According to Arendt (2006), after Socrates’ death, Plato began to discount persuasion
as sufficient for the guidance of men and he ‘started to seek something liable to compel
them [which was not reason] without using the external means of violence’ (p. 107) For
Plato, the trouble with the power of reason is ‘that only the few are subject to it, so that
the problem arises of how to assure that the many, the people who in the multitude com-
pose the body politic, can be submitted to the same truth’ (Arendt, 2006: 107). Authority
was theorized as a way of making people who do not know the truth ‘… behave as
though they knew the truth’ (Arendt, 2006: 132).
Authority emerges as a form of compulsion which is distinct from violence, yet has
something in common with it because it requires unquestioned obedience (Arendt, 1970:
46). ‘Its hallmark is unquestioning recognition by those who are asked to obey; neither
coercion nor persuasion is needed’ (Arendt, 1970: 45).
Authority is a form of legitimation of political power (Arendt, 2006: 111) that arises
from the belief in a source that transcends the political sphere. Arendt writes that ‘the
source of their authority, which legitimates the exercise of power, must be beyond the
sphere of power and, like the law of nature or the commands of God, must not be man-
made …’ (Arendt, 2006: 110).
In essence, this use of the divine is a claim for reification as source of compliance.
That which is conventional is made to appear other than that for the purposes of legiti-
mating domination. As argued by Haugaard and Pettit (2017), this form of reification is
sociologically common but constitutes arbitrary domination – as will be explained in
greater depth below.
In essence, Arendt makes the following three claims:
1. Authority ‘legitimates the exercise of power’;

2. This legitimation is possible by appeals to the law of nature or God;
3. This is effective because neither the law of nature nor God appear man-made or
conventional.
According to Arendt, in the Roman period, authority arose from the act of authorita-
tively created foundational myths that bind men through tradition and religious belief
(Arendt, 2006: 122). These traditions and religious beliefs obscure the fact that the politi-
cal institutions of Rome were socially constructed (man-made). She argues that the word
‘auctoritas derives from the verb augere, “augment” and what authority or those in
authority constantly augment is the foundation’ (Arendt, 2006: 121). She suggests that
people were considered to be like ‘children, they are exposed to error and mistake and
therefore need “augmentation” and confirmation through the council of elders’ (Arendt
2006: 123).
The Gods were part of the sacred foundational myth of Rome, which made the city
sacred and ‘the deeds of the ancestors and the usage that grew out of them were always
binding’ (Arendt, 2006: 213). It was a process whereby authority became linked to tradi-
tion and religion going back in time. What emerges is a trinity of authority, religion and
tradition. The Catholic Church took over this trinity, while Protestant reformers, includ-
ing Luther, sought to maintain authority without tradition, and secular political theorists,
most notably, Hobbes sought to develop authority without religion; both of which Arendt
(2006) disagrees with (pp. 126–128).
She considers modern revolutionary foundational acts a process that can recreate the
Roman foundational myth. In this regard, the American Revolution constitutes a para-
digmatic foundational act that attempts to serve as a source of authority in the Roman
sense (Arendt, 2006: 140). However, Arendt (2006) concludes the essay by casting doubt
upon the efficacy of this process because the trinity of authority, religion and tradition
creates a sense of the sacred which modern constitution building finds difficult to emu-
late (p. 141).
Haugaard 7
As will be demonstrated below, I consider the distinctions that Arendt draws

between authority, argumentation, laughter, violence and power extremely insightful.
However, Arendt’s trinity argument is normatively problematic. It is true that, socio-
logically speaking, tradition and reification by divine mystery increase authority but
this type of authority is not compatible with normative theory premised upon the equal
worth of citizens. In essence, Arendt is suggesting that the ordinary people are not
capable of being persuaded through argumentation, which is an elitist claim.
Consequently, they need the magic of religion and tradition to make them reach the
truth (for the wrong reasons). In the eighteenth century, this was a classic argument
against atheism for the masses (see Berman, 1990). However, for a contemporary nor-
mative theorist to argue along these lines is unacceptable condescension. Consequently,
we will methodologically bracket the normative endorsement of Roman authority
while building upon Arendt’s other observations.
Joseph Raz
Raz is a normative theorist who wishes to construct a liberal theory with conceptual
space for authority based upon the primacy of freedom. From the normative premise of
freedom as liberty, political authority appears problematic. As argued by the philosophi-
cal anarchist Robert Wolff (1970), if authority implies obedience then authority appears
to be incompatible with freedom. Hence, the absence of authority, which is anarchism,
follows from a normative commitment to freedom. However, to liberal normative theo-
rists, liberalism is not the same as anarchism. From Hobbes onwards, liberals have
accepted that politics entails authority so the problem becomes how to square the demand
for freedom with political institutions that entail authority.
In liberalism, coercion appears as inherently opposed to freedom. Thus, Hobbes’
coercive solution to the problem of social order is repellent. Replacing coercion with
authority is a move in the direction of legitimizing political institutions (Raz, 1990b: 15).
The normative problem is to theorize a form of governmental authority that protects and/
or promotes individual freedom (Raz, 1986: 21).
Like Weber and Arendt, Raz (1986) argues that coercive power is not equivalent to
authority. Your neighbour can exercise power over you with threats but that is not author-
ity (p. 24). These coercive threats do not amount to authority even in the case that the
neighbour may have legitimate cause for threatening you (Raz, 1986: 25). Consequently,
Raz (1986) concludes that it ‘seems plain that the justified use of coercive power is one
thing and authority another’ (p. 25).
Raz analyses legitimate authority from the perspective of understanding what it means
to recognize authority. If A has normatively legitimate authority or is an authority, this
means that those over whom they exercise authority ought to obey. This amounts to the
following:
A has authority
A decrees B is to do X
Therefore, B ought to do X.1 (Raz, 1986: 28)
Unlike Arendt, our reason for obeying authority is not an added (or augmented) rea-
son for obeying a specific command. Rather, it acts as substitute for the original reasons
that a specific authority was established. Let us examine a couple of examples to make
Raz’s argument clear.
Imagine that B and C are in disagreement over something and they decide to have a
neutral outside party help them decide a fair outcome. Therefore, they give A the author-
ity to arbitrate their dispute. However, B and C’s reasons for obedience to A are based
upon their original desire for a neutral arbiter. The authority of A now stands for the
authority of neutral arbiter. It is not added to that original reason but stands for it.
Contrary to appearances, standing for the original reasons does not make the authority of
A equivalent to the original reasons, which is contrary to the no-difference thesis (Raz, 1986:
48). For instance, the reasons B, C and D have for giving A authority may be that they wish
to overcome a collective actor problem, such as the tragedy of the commons or traffic con-
gestion. Once A has authority, she will develop a deeper appreciation of the complexity of
the collective actor problem. In the traffic case, it may include knowledge of the relative
efficacy of roundabouts versus traffic lights for different kinds of junctions which is knowl-
edge that the grantee actors B, C and D do not necessarily have. So, the authority of A is
more complex than simply A standing in for the particularities of the reasons of B, C and D.
Once A proves herself good at solving these collective actor problems, B, C and D become
willing to increase A’s authority. Thus, A’s authority expands and exceeds its origins.
While authority exceeds its source in B, C and D, it is not an independent reason for
compliance in itself. If, for instance, in the above examples, A is not a neutral arbiter or
A does not exercise her authority for the purposes of making the traffic flow, instead
using it to her personal benefit, then that authority ceases to be normatively legitimate.
Of course, in these cases A may remain as de facto authority (backed by coercion) but
that is not a normative reason for compliance.
In specific instances of authority, the individuals B, C and D reason for compliance
are related to authority in general. However, B, C and D should not need to evaluate
every instance of authority. If the police direct the traffic in one direction rather than
another, we should not interrogate every specific justification of such individual deci-
sions. This would be inefficient and counterproductive. The point of giving A the author-
ity is precisely that B, C and D do not have to spend time on every decision nor do they
have to acquire the requisite expertise. While authority should be in the interest of the
less powerful (the grantee of authority), compliance should be relatively automatic rather
than constantly returning to the original reasons for setting up the authority (Raz, 1990b:
10). However, if over an aggregate of individual decisions it becomes apparent that indi-
vidual acts of authority are contrary to its original reasons, this undermines the normative
justification for that authority. Therefore, the grantee is entitled to withdraw their obedi-
ence to authority.
Authority derives its force from the original considerations that established it, which
Raz (1986) terms the dependence thesis (p. 59):
All authoritative directives should be based, in the main, on reasons which already independently
apply to the subjects of the directives and are relevant to their action in the circumstances
covered by the directive. (Raz, 1990a: 125)
Haugaard 9
While authority remains dependent upon its origins, once the authority is established,
it absorbs and supplants the original origins for its creation because of efficiency, coor-
dination and bureaucratic complexity. Raz (1986) calls this the normal justification the-
sis which he defines as follows:
The normal way to establish that a person has authority over another person involves showing
that the alleged subject is likely better to comply with the reasons which apply to him (…) if he
accepts the directives of the alleged authority as authoritatively binding and tries to follow
them, rather than by trying to follow the reasons which apply to him directly. (p. 53)
In other words, authority comes to rest upon authority tracking the interests of those
over whom it is exercised (the grantees). The word normal distinguishes this definition
from what Raz considers deviant, and only de facto, forms of expression of authority. For
instance, in everyday life social actors frequently obey authority contrary to their original
interests because they do not want to hurt the feelings of persons exercising authority.
Adult children of elderly parents often accept the authority of the latter out of deference
(Raz, 1986: 54) but this is a deviant case. Similarly, individuals often comply with
authority contrary to their interests out of group identification, including nationalism.
Raz (1986) considers authority based upon group identity identification as ‘grossly mis-
placed’ (p. 55).
In Raz’s justification for authority, we see a sophisticated attempt to distance the con-
cept of authority from blind obedience, yet still preserve authority as relatively auto-
matic. This contrasts with Arendt’s trinity discussion which is a normative endorsement
of blind obedience. Dahl also writes that in instances of authority such as B follows A’s
order automatically, uncritically and unreflectively (Dahl and Stinebrickner, 2003: 42).
Another theorist of authority, Ladenson (1980) theorizes authority as obedience along
Hobbesian sovereign lines. The most famous philosophical statement of an assumed
equivalence between authority and blind obedience is found in Kant’s (2006) famous
essay, ‘An answer to the question: What is Enlightenment?’. In that work, Kant urges the
reader to have the courage to follow their own reason without relying on the authority of
others (see Bingham, 2008: 8). If liberal theory is to provide normative conceptual space
for authority, however, it cannot equate authority to blind obedience because that would
preclude rational critical thought which is central to liberal autonomy.
The normative challenge for liberal political theory is to create conceptual space for a
more reflective theorization of authority that is consistent with autonomy. The anarchist
objection to authority, which is that it entails abdication of autonomy, is countered by the
claim that social actors still have the right to revisit the original reasons for the establish-
ment of authority and that it must track the interests of those over whom it is exercised
(Raz, 1990b: 6). Hence, liberal authority emerges as a strictly delimited and redeemable
form of political power.
A re-theorization of authority
All three thinkers above agree that authority is a power-related concept. Hence, let us
make this our starting point. Like power, authority is a relational concept. The premise
of the liberal theorization is to focus entirely upon actor B – why should B accept the
authority of A? However, as argued by Lukes (1990), any complete theory of authority
must be a theory of both A and B. Normatively, it is important to understand not only
why someone should grant authority to another but also why it is important that someone
should have it.
Arendt’s (1970) characterization of power has been a significant corrective to the
assumption that power is always power-over someone and against the interests of the
subordinate. As has been argued convincingly by Morriss (2002; 2009) and Pansardi
(2012), power-over is a subset of power-to (see Allen, 1999 on the distinction between
power-over, power-to and power-with). In order for A to exercise power-over B, A must
have power-to in the first place. In the liberal tradition, the problem of authority and
freedom begins from the problem of power-over. However, as argued by Morriss (2009),
liberal freedom presupposes the capacity for action, hence power-to. So, let us start from
power-to in both the sociological and the normative characterizations of authority.
The sociological perspective

Thinking of authority as power-to significantly widens our conceptual agenda. Power-to
is the capacity for action constitutive of agency. Sociologically, the agency that arises
from political institutions is not qualitatively different from the agency of everyday life.
As we saw with Arendt, in the literature on authority theorists routinely refer to the
everyday authority a parent has over a child. Famously, Aristotle (1941) argues that
political authority is a derivative of family patriarchal authority (p. 1128). Weber also
recognizes the connection which is central to his account of patrimonial authority. In
contrast, Raz suggests that everyday familial authority is normatively different from
political authority.
I propose starting with everyday authority to understand the significance of everyday
authority as power-to, as this is the foundation of agency, from a sociological perspec-
tive. In order to understand agency authority, I will examine a case of a social actor who
approaches the zero-point of absent authority which serves as a juxtaposition to render
visible the form of everyday authority-based agency that social actors usually take for
granted.
Primo Levi was trained as a professional chemist in Milan but, in early 1944, he was
deported to Auschwitz where he worked as Jewish slave labour. For the first 6 months, he
did manual labour but in November 1944 he became an assistant inside the camp chemi-
cal laboratories of IG Farben’s Buna Werke. This saved his life as it spared him from the
cold of winter and enabled him secure extra rations by trading small items from the labo-
ratory for food. In his memoir, If This is a Man, Levi recounts the first days working in
the laboratory.
Levi entered the familiar surroundings of the laboratory wearing the striped pyjama-
like clothing and wooden clogs of Jewish inmates. Levi stank of the filth of the camp and
scratched from fleas. However, the familiar smell and surroundings made him momen-
tarily forget who he now was and how he appeared.
Inside the laboratory, the head of the laboratory was a German Polish political pris-
oner, Herr Stawinoga, who had higher status authority than the Jews. The laboratory also
Haugaard 11
included female cleaning and secretarial staff who were non-camp members including a
German girl, Fraulein Liczba. These women are described as the first real women that
Levi has met since joining the camp: they were not shaved, wore normal clothes, jewel-
lery and had the scent of perfume. Primo Levi (1991) described their interaction (or lack
of it) with him as follows:
… When they sweep, they sweep our feet. They never speak to us and turn up their noses when
they see us shuffling across and the laboratory, squalid and filthy, awkward and insecure in our
shoes. I once ask Fraulein Liczba for some information, and she did not reply but turned with
an annoyed face to Stawinoga and spoke to him quickly. I did not understand the sentence, but
I clearly grasped ‘stinkjude’ and my blood froze. Stawinoga told me that for anything to do with
work we should turn directly to him. (p. 168)
Being a Jew means that Primo Levi was not authorized to speak to an Aryan German.
In the social world of the camp there is a clear authority structure as follows: Jews, who
are largely treated as slaves and sub-humans; political prisoners, guilty of crimes against
the regime, but treated as persons; criminal Germans, criminals, but part of the master
race; ordinary Germans, who work in the camp during the day but are free to leave; and
finally, at the top, the Schutzstaffel (SS). Within this hierarchy, the Jews have social
agency among each other and can interact submissively with those who command their
work, but they do not have the authority to speak to those of high status, especially the
Germans.
This connects sociology with the intuition underpinning English language usage.
Without the appropriate status authority, the person cannot be author of their own verbal
text. If they should speak to someone of high authority, their speech act will be ignored
as if it didn’t happen. The fact that the Jew’s feet are swept by the German staff is sym-
bolic of the fact that they do not have the authority to be social actors. They are like the
furniture which is not entitled to speak.
To the reader from a liberal democratic society, such absence of authority appears
shocking. However, historically many castes such as Burakumin in Japan had this qual-
ity. In everyday speech, this is often described in terms of being untouchable. As argued
by Taylor (1989), one of the defining characteristics of liberal modernity is the value
placed upon ordinary life. Pettit (1997, 2012, 2014) argues that in the Roman republican
tradition citizenship is the opposite of slavery. Slavery is a position with negative status.
Modern republicanism in which citizenship becomes a right for all is a society in which
slavery is an anathema, because ordinary life has value as an end in itself. In contrast, the
fact that the German cleaners would sweep across the feet of the Jews is symbolic of the
fact that the Jews were not citizens. Rather they were slaves.
During his initial capture by Fascists, Levi (1991) described himself as ‘[a]n Italian
citizen of Jewish race’ (p. 4). In the camp being a citizen and being Jewish were an oxy-
moron. In contrast, in the liberal-cum-republican democratic overlapping consensus, the
category of citizen confers authority to interact with others upon everyone, and in so
doing makes untouchable status appear unreasonable or morally wrong. Essentially, the
Nazi racist theories resurrect non-citizen or slave status for those who were not Aryan.
When Fraulein Liczba refused to reply to Primo Levi, complaining that she had been
spoken to by a stinkjude, she was making the point that a non-citizen, non-human, slave
had spoken to her.
Primo Levi, like all slaves, was close to the zero-point of purely negative status, thus
lacking authority. I say, close to the zero-point because sociologically speaking status
and authority are scalar phenomena: you have more or less of it, as authority is always
from a certain perspective. Primo Levi did have significant authority among the other
Jews as someone who knew how to beat the system and survive within it. Also, the head
of laboratory, unlike the secretary, did show Primo Levi some respect, hence status
authority. So, Primo Levi did have some authority. Yet, relative to the German staff, he
was at the zero-point of non-agency.
Relatively authority-less social actors often form subcultures in which they have
authority. For instance, in marginalized communities, what the majority consider delin-
quent behaviour such as joyriding cars can have high status and authority among the
excluded (Lappin, 2017).
In terms of social reproduction, positions of authority are essentially performative
phenomena. As I have shown above, Austin uses the absence of authority to show the
essence of authority. Let us for a moment re-examine Austin’s thought experiment char-
acterization of performatives:
Suppose for example, I see a vessel on the stock, walk up and smash the bottle hung on the
stem, proclaim ‘I name this ship the Mr. Stalin’ and for good measure kick away the chocks: but
the trouble is, I was not the person chosen to name it (whether or not – an additional complication
– Mr. Stalin was the destined name: perhaps in a way it is even more of a shame if it was). We
shall agree
1) that the ship was not thereby named;
2) that it is an infernal shame
One could say that ‘I went through a form of’ naming the vessel but that my action was void or
without effect, because I was not a proper person, had not the ‘capacity’, to perform it: but one
might also alternatively say…it is a mockery, like marriage to a monkey. (Austin, 1975: 23–24)
Austin did not have the authority to name ships, just as Primo Levi did not have the
authority to speak to Germans. In Weber’s account of authority, we see the justification
of authority relative to a belief in legitimacy. The word belief points us towards the epis-
temic aspect of authority. With respect to the two systems of thought (Nazi and Austin’s
Britain) their actions are not considered infelicitous. Infelicitous action is not simply
wrong, but suggests some kind of deep unreasonableness which means that it can be
ignored as irrelevant. This unreasonableness is not of the discursive normative and
rational choice variety described by Raz. It is not that the responding actors B rationalize
that A exceeds their authority because they are not tracking their interests, or that it
breaks with some original contractual conditions. In Austin’s example, it could be the
case that the persons passing by are also communist by persuasion, so they might prefer
the name Joseph Stalin to QE2, but the action would still be considered unreasonable
within their specific tacit interpretative horizon.
Haugaard 13
The justification of authority exists at two levels: it exists epistemically, as reasonable

within a local system of meaning, and it exists as reasonable relative to some discur-
sively set out reasons within liberal democratic theory as described by Raz. The former
is epistemic legitimate authority which is a sociological observation concerning tacit
knowledge, while the latter concerns normative legitimate authority which entails a dis-
cursively articulable political theory judgement.
The instances of authority that Raz describes as deviant (such as parental authority or
authority based on a sense of collective belonging) are instances of epistemic authority.
Raz considers these forms of authority in some sense of a lesser order. However, a nor-
mative theorist cannot ignore epistemic authority as it defines the sociological conditions
of possibility for legitimate authority to exist. On a sociological level, this form of
authority is a social fact, as Durkheim (1982) put it (pp. 50–59).
As a form of power, authority follows along the four dimensions of power (Haugaard,
2012b). To summarize these briefly,
1. The first-dimension (henceforth 1-D) of power consists of agency, manifest as

power-to and power-over.
2. The second-dimension (2-D) is the structural context, which defines the condi-
tions of possibility in the circumstances of any social relations.
3. The third-dimension (3-D) of power concerns the tacit knowledge, or episteme
which actors use to make sense of these structural constraints.
4. The fourth-dimension (4-D) of power covers the making of people as social sub-
jects. It is the social ontology that defines their collective being-in-the-world.
Relative to the interpretative horizon of the Third Reich the meaning category of Jew
suggests a racial inferiority. Consequently, Levi’s social action is considered infelicitous
and he is not granted the power-to to speak to Germans/Aryans/Master Race. In other
words, the third-dimension (3-D) of power entailed signifiers which made interaction
structurally outside the condition of possibility (2-D) and rendered Levi powerless or
without agency (1-D). In the case of naming ships, relative to the tacit interpretative
horizon of British society (3-D), it is considered reasonable that a person bearing the
authority signifier Queen has the power-to to name ships, while for an ordinary citizen or
British subject to which Austin belonged, this would be outside the conditions of possi-
bility (2-D). Hence, Austin did not have the authority to be author of the name of the ship
in question, while the Queen does have that authority.
Let us return to Dahl’s original intuitive 1-D description of power. He imagines a
policeman directing traffic in a way that it would not normally go. This ‘accords with
what I conceive to be the bedrock idea of power to say that the policeman acting in this
particular role evidently has power …’ (Dahl, 1957: 202). The words particular role
implicitly refers to authority as performative.
Dahl argues that this form of power is not general but is of a specific scope. The traffic
police of New Haven have authority over the students at Yale with regard to where they
park their cars. However, only Professor Dahl has the authority to compel them to take
an examination on a particular day. The authority of the traffic police and professor con-
fer powers of different scopes (Dahl, 2002: 12–13). Authority is different from other
forms of power in that its scope is usually specific because it is tied into a system of
meaning. In contrast, coercive Macht power can be used in a multiplicity of ways.
When I lecture upon the topic of the scope of authority, I often perform an informal
breaching experiment along the lines of Garfinkel (1984). I inform my student-audience
that I am changing the deadline for their next essay which is greeted seriously as a rea-
sonable exercise of 1-D power that I, with the authority of Professor, might undertake. I
follow this with a different command that is entirely inappropriate to my authority. I
command them to take a cold shower when they get home. Interestingly, the student’s
response to the second command, outside the scope of my power, is laughter. My com-
mand is absurd relative to their épistème (3-D). Laughter is a response to the impossibil-
ity and incompatibility of the signifier Professor and the command to shower. This is the
significance of Arendt’s observation that authority and laughter are opposites. The per-
son who laughs is reacting to the incommensurability of this act of structuration with
their interpretative horizon. It is the impossibility of confirming the meaning of the act of
structuration engaged in by those in authority because the action of other is ‘unreasona-
ble’. The only response possible to Austin’s naming of the ship Joseph Stalin is laughter.2
The same can be said of the modern reader’s interpretation of the (supposed) quotation
from Chinese encyclopaedia which Foucault (1970) refers to in The Order of Things (p.
xv). The passage kept Foucault (1970) ‘laughing for a long time’ (p. xvii) because of the
impossibility of it. It is outside the conditions of possibility (2-D) because of the tacit
episteme (3-D). Consequently, this encyclopaedia has no plausible scientific authority. It
cannot speak to us and has virtually no agency (1-D) except to make us laugh and feel
discomfort at the thought that someone could possibly think that the list is reasonable.
Authority is based upon an epistemic perception of reasonableness of a performance.
As we see with the encyclopaedia example, this performance does not require a living
co-present agent: it can be performed by an ancient book whose author is long since
dead. This reasonableness is qualitatively different from normative justification. It is
relative to the specific system of meaning that a social actor has internalized as the natu-
ral order of things. When Raz defines the authority of a parent or authority gained through
group identification as deviant forms of authority, he is missing this significant socio-
logical characteristic of authority. In a gerontocracy, the performance of elders carries
authority epistemically.
A shift in interpretative horizon shapes the conditions of possibility for authority. For
instance, with regard to group identification, once a nationalist epistemic interpretative
horizon permeates society, it becomes impossible for non-members of the group to main-
tain authority even when they rule in the interests of those over whom they exercise
power. Think of the impossibility of a successful or stable benign colonial authority in
the age of nationalism. Once nationalism becomes part of the natural order of things or
part of everyday 3-D discourse, this automatically strips authority from those who do not
belong to the nation (however that is defined: ethnically, racially, culturally, religiously,
etc.). Following Arendt’s contrast between authority and violence, those in colonial
authority may substitute violence or argumentation to the effect that the interests of the
colonized are being served, but both these strategies suggest the absence of authority. In
the late nineteenth century, the British government tried to kill Irish nationalism through
a series of land reforms and other progressive social measures. The slogan was ‘killing
Haugaard 15
home-rule by kindness’ but benign colonial authority (kindness) could not stem the ris-
ing tide of nationalism (Lyons, 2009: 207).
Weber argued that there are four forms of action. In place of these four forms, I use
the idea of local interpretative horizons which are multiple. They frame different types of
action for social actors. It is not that we transit from one to the other as some kind of
evolutionary progress. Following Goffman’s (1971) characterization of everyday social
action, competent social actors have multiple interpretative horizons that make sense of
the authority of different social situations. Replacing the four types with multiple inter-
pretative horizons, Weber’s insistence upon the link between authority and belief points
to the fact that legitimate authority must be grounded in (3-D) system meanings which
gives authority recognition a felicity aspect that is beyond normative reason.
When a person whose authority is not validated by the beliefs of the less powerful
persists in claiming authority, this means it is governing through coercion. This is what
Raz called de facto authority. However, Raz’s de facto authority includes authority as a
social fact. As theorized here, sociological forms of authority are real authority even if
they cannot be defended normatively. For instance, patriarchal authority may be a social
fact for a given society but is contrary to the contemporary liberal democratic normative
principles.
Many positions of authority simulate sociological authority but are based more upon
coercion than belief in legitimacy. Those in authority retain their authority signifier title
and the (supposed) grantee goes through the appropriate actions as if they have a belief
in authority. However, in place of belief there is fear of sanctions. This is a masquerade
of authority. Everyone may go through the correct actions but it is not the same as actual
authority. It is like marriage to a monkey in the Austin thought experiment. A simulacrum
is an imitation of something which is not that thing. When authority that mimics real
authority based upon belief but which is actually based upon coercion, I term it simula-
crum authority.
As suggested by Scott’s (1990) account of resistance, the contrived nature of simula-
crum authority is often revealed by subtle symbolic acts of resistance. To give an instance,
currently Israel has checkpoints in the West Bank where Palestinians are expected to
produce identity cards. However, as part of a Palestinian policy of passive resistance
(Samud) when asked to produce their cards, they do so in a symbolically slow and unnat-
ural way (Johansson and Vinthagen, 2015: 118). As observed by Arendt, one of the vis-
ible signatures of legitimate authority is that it has a level of automaticness about it. Thus
thoughtful slow deliberation is a way of making manifest that this is not a genuine
authority relationship. It is a subtle way of saying: yes I will give you my identity card
because you have the coercive power. However, based upon my beliefs you have no legiti-
mate authority. This subtle act of resistance signals simulacrum authority. To distinguish
between real authority and simulacrum authority, a sociologist should look for small acts
of resistance as tell-tale signs. The use of work-to-rule strategies is another instance of
this kind of symbolic resistance. The private discourses of subaltern groups are another
source where social actors express their absence of belief in the legitimacy of simula-
crum authority (see Scott 1990). I would argue that this is predominantly 2-D power as
there is not ideological incorporation of the subaltern actor as revealed by the acts of
symbolic resistance.
The felicity/infelicity aspect of authority applies all the way up from everyday life to
the highest reaches of political authority. Yanis Varoufakis describes this process when
he became the Greek finance minister. Accustomed to the authority of University lec-
turer, he was used to an academic world where economic argumentation was a norm.
However, the world of finance Ministers in Brussels was one of prearranged communi-
qués, prefabricated votes, coalitions and endless attention to technical details. From the
day Varoufakis assumed office as Finance Minister, he attempted to put together a pro-
posal to put to the Troika and the European Council of Ministers based upon a whole
series of economic arguments rather than bureaucratic regulations. In order to construct
this document, he consulted with a number of economists with high authority in the aca-
demic world and co-authored the final version of his proposal with Professor Jeff Sachs
of Columbia University. Varoufakis (2016) describes the reception of their document as
follows:
I am often asked: Why were these proposals of your ministry rejected? They were not. The
Eurogroup and the troika did not have to reject them because they never allowed me to put them
on the table. When I began speaking about them, they would look at me as if I were singing the
Swedish national anthem.
Again, notice that this rejection is of a performative kind. Trying to create a document
that is economic, rather than bureaucratically procedural, is entirely infelicitous in that
context. It is like standing up and singing the Swedish national anthem. It is as absurd as
Levi, a Jew, intoxicated by the familiar smells of the laboratory, thinking that he had the
authority to interact with an Aryan cleaner. Notice that Varoufakis’ proposals were not
rejected intellectually as discursive knowledge. There is no 1-D power conflict. To be
ignored and treated as if you are suddenly singing the Swedish national anthem is some-
thing entirely different. It is 2-D exclusion justified by the perception that his interven-
tion was ‘unreasonable’ within the local 3-D language game of the European Union
Council of Ministers. However, if Varoufakis had presented the same document at an
academic conference, it would have been engaged with even if it were refuted.
This epistemic quality of 3-D power goes back to Foucault’s distinction between
speaking the language of truth, while uttering falsehoods and being outside the condi-
tions of possibility of the local truth game (see Haugaard, 2012a). Recently, this aspect
of 3-D has been theorized by Jenkins and Lukes (2017) as the power of occlusion. They
theorize the performatively infelicitous and epistemically unreasonable in terms of cat-
egory mistakes. Jenkins and Lukes (2017) open their article with the following observa-
tion: ‘To not be right is one thing, but to be told that what one says or believes is “not
even wrong” is an even harder pill to swallow’ (p. 6). This is followed by the example of
Douglas Adam’s (1995) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where the supercomputer
Deep Thought is asked for the meaning of life and the universe and replies that it is ‘42’
(Jenkins and Lukes, 2017: 7). We, the readers, do not know the meaning of life or the
universe. Yet, we do know that the answer cannot be ‘42’ which is a category mistake. I
would add that a category mistake appears as such relative to a particular interpretative
horizon. We cannot imagine the interpretative horizon where 42 would make sense, so it
makes us laugh. Simultaneously, Deep Thought loses all authority.
Haugaard 17
Friedman (1990) makes the distinction between being ‘in authority’ and being ‘an
authority’ (p. 57). A person in authority is who occupies a position which may either be
simulacrum authority (a position backed by coercion) or it can also be genuine authority
which is linked to a system of meaning. An authority is person whose position of author-
ity is epistemically resonant. It is reasonable to follow their command. Therefore, an
authority does not require coercion to maintain their power. The Chinese Encyclopaedia
is no longer an authority nor is Deep Thought once it gives 42 as the meaning of life.
The perception of infelicity is linked to both meaning and a local logic of reason. To
contrast bureaucratic with patrimonial authority, the former reason derives from an
abstract instrumental and legal rationality while the latter is based upon the sanctity of
tradition (Weber, 1978: 1006). This reasoning does not exist in isolation from meaning
but is inextricably tied up with it. In the former, concepts like impartiality are intrinsic to
the interpretative horizon, while in the latter, concepts like loyalty and honour are cru-
cial. These are two local language games (Wittgenstein, 1967: § 7) with their own logics
that occlude and include certain meanings. These language games are, of course, ideal
types and social actors often switch from one to other. To rethink Sartre’s conundrum
concerning the choice between fighting for your country and looking after your mother,
imagine the conflict that a judge feels between being impartial or being loyal when con-
fronted with an offender to whom they may have personal bonds. In Weber’s terminol-
ogy, this is a conflict of traditional and legal/bureaucratic authority. In most legal
jurisdictions such a situation is termed a conflict of interest and considered a reason to
recuse the judge from the case. As theorized here, the difference in interests comes about
because two logics and systems of meaning are pulling in opposite directions. Traditional
action and legal-bureaucratic rationality are local interpretative horizons that make cer-
tain forms of authority appear reasonable and occlude others as infelicitous.
Weber uses the terms traditional action and legal-bureaucratic rationality to suggest
that one form of action was less rational than the other. I would argue that traditional
action is only less rational from the perspective of modernity and the normative princi-
ples of liberal democracy but, in its own terms, relative to the interpretative horizon of a
traditional society, it is entirely rational. It is both felicitous and backed by reasons as
opposed to being some kind of unconsidered reflex action as suggested by Weber.
Normative aspects of authority

In the liberal tradition, authority is theorized as in tension with freedom. The problem is
how to make democratic circulation of elites and modern bureaucratic authority com-
patible with the freedom-limiting nature of authority. As we saw, anarchists claim that
authority is incompatible with freedom. The challenge for liberals is to start from the
same freedom/autonomy foundations as anarchists while providing conceptual space
for authority.
Part of the reason for the perceived opposition between power and authority stems
from the equation of authority with power-over and the latter with domination. As argued
by Pettit (2012), liberal theory assumes that political institutions thwart freedom. In con-
trast, the Roman republican tradition interprets political institutions as a prerequisite for
the kind of political freedoms enjoyed by citizens. While Pettit and Arendt come from
different republican traditions, Arendt similarly suggests that politics is a condition of

possibility of power by which she means empowerment and power-to. In the liberal tra-
dition, Morriss (2009) has argued that freedom is based on the possession of power-to,
and Pansardi (2012) has argued that power-to is the more fundamental form of power.
These positions suggest that authority is not the opposite of freedom but is in fact a pre-
condition of it.
From a normative perspective, Raz emphasizes that authority is granted by the less
powerful to those in authority. Consequently, that authority should track the interests of
the grantee. It is unreasonable for one person to grant another something that undermines
his or her interests. I would suggest that this does not simply arise from some form of
instrumental rational expediency. Stronger than that, at the foundation of liberal democ-
racy is the concept of the value of ordinary life (Taylor, 1989). This is reflected in the
Kantian formulation of the categorical imperative whereby a person should not be a
means to an end but always an end in herself (Kant, 1959: 429; Korsgaard, 1996: 17).
Following this principle entails that the authority that B grants to A should not turn B into
a means for A’s ends.
Following the ancient distinction between slave and citizen, a person who exists for
someone else’s ends is a slave. The latter is a person without their own telos, but who
exists for the telos of his or her master (Aristotle, 1941: 1130–1133). However, modern
democratic theory is premised upon every (i.e. every full-fledged member of society –
often highly contested) citizen. So, no one can grant another authority that would entail
selling themselves for someone else’s use. Even if social actors ‘voluntarily’ sell them-
selves into slavery as a social fact such action is not normatively defensible. Citizenship
is an inalienable right to those who are considered members of the nation – although who
comprise the latter is often a point of contestation. This means that even when a 3-D
ideology legitimates voluntary self-alienation, as a social fact, this is not normatively
legitimate relative to contemporary liberal and republican democratic theory.
As we saw, Primo Levi nearly reached the virtual zero-point of the absence of author-
ity. He was abject, his feet being swept over as if he were part of the floor. It is also
noteworthy that the labour demanded of the Jewish prisoners treated them as expendable.
They were neither given the warmth nor the food to replace the energy taken from them
during their labour. It was a form of labour-unto-death whereby their life force was taken
from them as part of the labour. In their expendability, they represented as close as it is
possible to get to the ideal type of the inverse of the Kantian dictum: their existence was
entirely for the sake of others. They could be used in an entirely trivial way, as in the case
of female prisoners who were forced to shovel sand from one heap to another and back
again all day long. They were worked to death for absolutely no practical gain (Levi,
2013: 135).
Citizenship is a fundamental baseline in which all members of the political commu-
nity are given the authority to interact with others on a principle of equal moral worth,
whereby each can, to use Pettit’s felicitous expression, look the other into the eyes with-
out fear or deference. As theorized by Pettit, the eye-ball test is essentially a test of equal
status and authority (Haugaard and Pettit, 2017; Pettit, 2012: 84–88). The citizen is
someone who is guaranteed the requisite power-to not to be abject or to exist for the sake
of another (see Savery, 2015). The citizen has the right to the requisite authority to be
Haugaard 19
treated as an end in herself. Citizens have the liberty to give someone else the authority
over them but with the normative proviso that their citizenship cannot be alienated.
The abuse of authority also entails breaking a tacit social contract. Parsons (2002: 78)
maintained that authority is similar to money as a form of prescriptive communication.
Giving authority to another is not dissimilar to paying in advance for a service.
Consequently, it is an implicit social contract and thus links into the liberal contract tradi-
tion begun by Locke (1924) and revived by Rawls (1971). This normative analysis also
follows the Rawlsian principle of referring justice back to what is reasonable for the
person who is worst off (Rawls, 2003: 57), who, in this case, is the grantee of authority.
In borrowing from both liberal and republican traditions, I am drawing upon what
Rawls (1993) would term an overlapping consensus (pp. 150–154) between the two
traditions. Pettit’s republicanism shares with liberalism that it also begins with freedom
as a premise. As Pettit (2012) observes, his republicanism is actually stronger in this
regard than Rawls’ version of liberalism. In Rawls’ liberalism, freedom is qualified by
equality using the difference principle as a qualifying adjunct principle, while republi-
canism is premised upon freedom without qualification (Haugaard and Pettit, 2017: 37).
By drawing upon the Kantian moral imperative, I am drawing upon equality but in a
manner commensurable with the republican freedom principle. It is equality in terms of
the equal moral worth of all citizens which is not an add-on material argument. This is
not to deny that there are differences between the traditions upon which I draw in this
argument. The republicanism I refer to is that of Pettit’s reconstruction of the Roman
republican tradition and not the more perfectionist versions inspired by Rousseau where
there would be significant areas of theoretical conflict with the left-liberal tradition,
exemplified by Rawls. My claim is a broad one concerning the foundation of the over-
lapping consensus of modern liberal democracy. In any case, I use these arguments,
drawn from different traditions as conceptual tools which are integrated into a singular
self-standing argument that is pragmatist in its foundations.
Inspired by Rorty (1989), my underlying normative foundation is a simple question:
what is power for? The answer is that social and political power is useful for the purposes
of giving social actors agency or power-to. Power-over is normatively justified to the
extent to which it delivers power-to for the less powerful. Authority is a form of social
power that is normatively legitimate to the extent to which it empowers the grantee of
power or the less powerful. In this reading, the Kantian argument that persons are an end
in themselves, the liberal demand for autonomy and republican emphasis upon citizen-
ship as enabling are all ways of focussing in upon the fact that authority is normatively
justifiable to the extent to which the grantee of authority gains agency or power-to even
when this involves giving A power-over them. I will now explain how this is possible.
Starting from premise of freedom, we have demonstrated that citizens are entitled to
a certain degree of authority, which delivers power-to. We have also learned that they
cannot alienate power-over that undermines that capacity. However, since routine poli-
tics and administration entail significant power-over, by what normative principles
should such a citizen give another person authority over them?
As was convincingly argued by Parsons (2002), and more recently by Read (2012)
and Haugaard (2012b), power is not zero-sum but variable-sum. It is not necessarily the
case that the power-over that A exercises over B is at the expense of B. When power is
positive-sum, there is a feedback from power-over to power-to. In the case of norma-

tively legitimate authority, the less powerful grant compliance to those in authority in
exchange for increased power-to.
Raz maintains that the grantee need not evaluate every authority decision which sug-
gests that every decision need not be beneficial to the grantee. According to Raz, indi-
vidual instances of power-over when taken singly and out of context may be counter to
B’s short-term interests, but in aggregate, over time, the power-over must lead to a ben-
eficial feedback. The point at issue here is that routine political authority often entails
power-over that individual social actors may find onerous.
As it stands, Raz’s analysis is potentially flawed in a manner similar to utilitarianism.
Hypothetically those in power could justify demeaning forms of authority by using
long-term consequentialist arguments. An individual grantee could be placed into tem-
porary slavery for some long-term good. To avoid this possibility, I wish to add to our
normative frame a combination of Pettit’s (2014), Haugaard and Pettit (2017) charac-
terization of the tough-luck test and Clegg’s (1989) distinction between episodic and
dispositional power.
The tough-luck test is so designed as to capture the types of routine state interference
that are not domination (Haugaard and Pettit, 2017: 36). It is meant to capture the differ-
ence between an injustice and adverse political decisions in a manner that parallels the
distinction between injustice and misfortune (damage from a storm is misfortune but not
injustice).
The operation of the tough-luck principle is most easily explained using the principles
of a democratic election. In a free and fair election, there comes a point when the losing
side recognizes that they have lost and acknowledge the political authority of the winner.
They have power exercised over them, yet that power-over is tough-luck rather than an
illegitimate act of domination. As will be explained below, not all actual forms of demo-
cratic election pass the tough-luck test, but as a normative ideal, democracy should be so
constituted that the defeated party feels that their defeat is tough-luck rather than an
injustice (see Haugaard, 2015). The same applies to taxation. No one likes to pay tax but
it is usually not an injustice. How do we distinguish these tough-luck exercises of power-
over from dominating power-over?
In any exercise of authority, we must distinguish between what Clegg (1989) terms
episodic and dispositional power. Episodic power refers to the immediate outcome (in the
Dahl traffic police example, A makes B turn right, instead of left), while dispositional
power refers to the longer systemic and structural powers of A (authority of traffic police)
and B (authority of driver) that are reproduced. The moment B turns as directed by A, B
reproduces the dispositional authoritative power of A. B’s response is an act of structural
reproduction (confirming-structuration to A’s structuration [Haugaard, 1997]) that repro-
duces the dispositional authority of A as traffic police, and of B as citizen-cum-road-user.
In an election, the episodic exercise of power is the victory of party A over party B.
However, the moment B concedes defeat to A the structures of the democratic process
are reproduced. Consequently, the dispositional power of both A and B is reproduced.
The democratic process not only confers episodic victory upon A but also confers dispo-
sitional power upon party B which can be used to defeat party A at the next election.
Consequently, conceding defeat entails structural reproduction of a system that confers
Haugaard 21
dispositional power upon both A and B. As long as B gains the dispositional power of
playing again the episodic defeat of B is tough-luck. The democratic process is a posi-
tive-sum process that facilitates A episodically and dispositionally, and B with disposi-
tional power but not episodic power.
Applying this to the wider issue of the trade-off between episodic and dispositional
power, every episodic power-over should have implicit within it dispositional gain which
outweighs the episodic loss. If the exercise of power-over is a total loss for the grantee,
both episodically and dispositionally, then the grantee becomes a means to an end. As we
shall see below, there are many instances in which episodic compliance entails disposi-
tional empowerment, but also many where it does not even in what is called the demo-
cratic process. However, I shall begin with bureaucratic power as this is the least complex
to explain.
Bureaucratic authority is equivalent to what Weber (1978) termed legal authority
(p. 217). However, I have not used this as the general term as I see legality as only one
aspect of this form of authority. Bureaucratic authority can take many forms, including
collective actor authority, expert authority and legal authority.
Hobbes’ account of the social contract is a solution to the inconvenience of the state
of nature which is a metaphor for the collective actor problem. Each individually desires
power-to, however the consequence of each pursuing their power-to results is a subopti-
mal situation of war of each against all. Consequently, these social actors obtain less
power-to than if they were to set up a collective authority with the necessary power-over
to enable them overcome their collective actor problem. In rational-choice theory, the
standard account of this is the tragedy of the commons (see Laver, 1997). Acting indi-
vidually, the farmers despoil the commons but with a centralized authority they can pre-
serve the commons. While each will experience the authority overseeing the commons
as onerous episodic power-over (when prevented from egoistic behaviour such as obtain-
ing more cattle), they all gain dispositional power to use the commons in a sustainable
manner.
Normatively, Dahl’s (1957) intuitive idea of power exemplified by a police officer
making a car turn one way when it would normally go the other way follows the same
logic. Briefly, driver B does not want to go in the direction indicated by the police author-
ity (episodic power-over), yet the police officer’s actions keep the traffic flowing
smoothly. Thus B gains dispositional power to use an effective traffic system.
Collective actor power-over authority translates most effectively into dispositional
power through impartial authority. The moment A slants the system away from some
actors towards others or towards themselves, then the grantee of authority (B) is being
turned into a means to an end. Over a period of time the more biased the system, the
less dispositional power the worst-off gain. Conversely, the more impartial system, the
more dispositional power the worst-off maintain. The need for impartiality is the link
between collective actor bureaucracy and the rule of law which acts a guarantor of
impartiality. Hence, there is a direct link between effective bureaucracy and legality as
noted by Weber.
In practice, the rule of law is rarely perfectly impartial. Law is often biased in favour
of some groups over others, and law is often not blind to prejudice. However, this is not
an either/or black/white situation. These are correlations. In any case, being the subject
of episodic power-over entails some loss because it is a relative trade-off between epi-
sodic and dispositional power. The person who loses an election episodically does lose
something even in a perfectly democratic system. So, this is a scale in any case. If those
charged with authority are not perfectly impartial or a democracy is somewhat imbal-
anced, we move down the scale from normatively legitimate authority towards dominat-
ing authority. But it is not one or the other: most actual democracies are a little of both.
The more perfectly impartial authority is, the greater the ratio of surplus power-to is.
Consequently, there will tend to be a positive feedback from well-exercised authority to
great compliance. The more impartial, the greater the tendency to compliance and the
more positive-sum the power relationship is. Similarly, the reverse is also the case, lead-
ing to a decline in voluntary compliance and a decrease in positive-sum power. At a
certain point, there is so little positive-sum power that authority has become a dominat-
ing authority which requires coercion to reproduce itself.
There is a disease of bureaucracy linked to the (laudable) desire for impartiality. A
bureaucracy should be a means to an end but can become an end in itself. This is the
iron cage of bureaucracy whereby procedures become fetishized as an ultimate end.
This can occur as a by-product of the desire for perfect impartiality and the rule of law.
The desire for the unachievable which is a perfect implementation results in bureau-
crats avoiding decisions because individual responsibility is seen as a source of contin-
gency and therefore partiality. This results in a form of Kafkaesque bureaucracy which
delivers more and more rules and red tape with no obvious objective other than self-
perpetuation. Rather than facilitating agency power-to, the grantees of authority are
rendered entirely immobilized, running from office to office with form after form (see
Clegg et al., 2016 for a fascinating empirical study of this form of bureaucracy). This
type of domination is curious in that B is a means to an end although it is not to A’s
ends. Rather, the immobilization of B is considered necessary by A in order to preserve
the beloved bureaucracy. Thus A is in a strange way altruistic in their domination of B.
This is not corruption – a charge that could give B a potential normative critical lever
against A. At its most extreme, there is no tangible A at all, but just endless rules and
procedures. This approximates to rule by nobody which Arendt (1970) describes as the
ultimate tyranny (p. 38). This is one of the most stable and insidious forms of dominat-
ing authority.
In modern society, we live in a world driven by diplomas and certificates because
expert authority constitutes an integral part of everyday life. As Gellner (1983) argues,
the modern state is not only about the monopoly of violence but also the monopoly of
education. In a complex society in which social actors are constantly interacting with
strangers, demanding services from them, they need to know whose expert authority is
trustworthy. The certification of education is a way of creating trust. Typically, in the
waiting room of a medical consultant the doctor’s medical certificates adorn the walls
like pictures. The objective is to convince the patient that it is reasonable to trust the doc-
tor with authority. As modern social actors cannot be polymaths (with a knowledge of
medicine, engineering and all the various expert services they regularly require), they
have to franchise out these decisions to expert authority figures. A doctor is in authority
by virtue of their social role but this is legitimate if they constitute an authority (Friedman,
1990). State-backed educational certificates are quick way to if someone is an authority,
Haugaard 23
thus it makes it reasonable to place them in authority which confers dispositional capac-
ity to the grantees.
Expert authority is, like all other forms of authority, subject to corruption and may
become a dominating authority. Again, this is not an either/or phenomenon but scalar.
An everyday instance of abuse of expert authority is overcharging for a service – often
by pretending that a job is more complex than it really is. The overcharge is an instance
of treating the compliant actor as a means to an end, while the service performed may
still deliver dispositional power-to the compliant authority-granting actor. So, it is a
mixed case.
A more serious abuse of expert authority is to manipulate people into decisions that
they would not otherwise make through false truth claims – the social actor is in author-
ity by pretending to be an authority. As we saw, Arendt argued that authority be made
unreflective by appeals to God and the Truth (with a capital T). Such techniques use the
Divine and Truth to obscure the conventional foundations of authority. Through reifica-
tion, which is a form of 3-D power, the grantee is thus manipulated into accepting an
authority that they would not otherwise. It is ironic, in my view, that what Arendt appears
to recommend (augmentation of authority by reification) is one of the most insidious
forms of domination.
In modernity, this form of dominating expert authority is often combined with the
fetishization of rules. Expert committees generate endless reports to justify bureaucracy
that has become an end in itself. Bureaucratic rules and procedures are reified by experts
who make them immutable in an increasingly Kafkaesque world which delivers little or
no dispositional power-to for those subject to the bureaucracy (Clegg et al., 2016).
The democratic process is an organizational structure that is created for the purposes
of distributing authority, ensuring a circulation of elites. The typical Western model, as
characterized by Schumpeter (1976), is a process where politicians and parties compete
for votes. As stated above, ideally speaking, the episodic of loss of power by B should be
outweighed by a dispositional gain. Hence, even in defeat, B is not a means to A’s ends,
and their episodic loss is a form of tough luck. B gains the dispositional power of being
able to avail of the democratic system to prevail over B on another day. However, while
this works as an ideal type, actual democracy does not always deliver positive-sum
power for the defeated party.
When A wins, the scope of authority to govern should be strictly limited. It must be
constitutionally impossible for A to deprive B of any of the dispositional powers that she
requires to compete in the next election. Thus for instance, A must not have the authority
to limit B’s freedom of speech in a manner that would prevent B from selling her ideas
to the electorate. A whole raft of other similar liberal rights follows from this principle.
If A uses her authority to deprive B of fundamental dispositional capacities that is not
tough-luck for B but it is domination.
According to John Stuart Mill (2015), one of the dangers to democracy is a phenom-
enon he terms the tyranny of the majority (p. 8). As theorized here, tyranny of the major-
ity takes place when a minority repeatedly loses the democratic contest. If it is a foregone
conclusion that B will lose the current and subsequent democratic contests, then B gains
no dispositional power by participating in the election. This suggest that electoral sys-
tems that favour majority power such as first-past-the-post systems, in which the winner
takes all, are less legitimate than proportional systems. However, this may be mitigated
by the plurality of the society in question. In a highly plural society, there may not be
permanent majorities even with first-past-the-post system. So, legitimacy of this form of
democracy is variable, depending upon circumstances.
Another way in which an ostensibly democratic process can deliver normatively ille-
gitimate authority is through conflict between sociological grounds of legitimacy and
normative foundations. This is a complex area, so I will merely sketch some of the under-
lying issues.
Sociological authority versus normative authority

The distinction between sociological and normative authority entails that the two can be
out of sync. For instance, it may be a social fact that the majority of a given society
believes patriarchal authority is legitimate. However, according to the normative princi-
ples above, patriarchal authority would not qualify as normatively legitimate.
In Arendt’s account of Ancient Greek and Roman authority, we see a mismatch
between sociological and normative authority. The idea that rituals and claims to truth,
which are not really true, can be used to make the grantees of authority believe in author-
ity is sociologically correct but normatively reprehensible as explained here. Social con-
ventions are made to appear as other than social constructions, thus given a form of
compulsion that can be used to make B compliant to authority that is against her episodic
and dispositional interests.
Arendt wishes to use tradition to augment authority. Like Weber, by tradition she
means recursive action that is unreflective. This is evident from her critique of Luther’s
appeal to ‘unguided individual judgement’ (Arendt, 2006: 128), which is portrayed as a
critique of tradition and dangerous to authority. I would agree with the claim that tradi-
tion can be used to augment authority as a sociological observation. Yet, I am not con-
vinced that traditional action is as unreflective as Arendt and Weber think. To the extent
to which traditional action is unreflective, however, it is indeed a social fact that B may
grant authority based upon a belief in the sanctity of tradition. But, to the extent to which
tradition obscures that B, the worst-off, does not gain dispositional power-to from grant-
ing that authority, it is normatively dominating authority. Notice that I have presented
this as a correlation: not in black and white, either/or, terms.
Weber (1978) writes that the projection of charismatic authority occurs when the
leader is ‘considered extraordinary and treated with supernatural, superhuman, or at least
specially exceptional powers’ (p. 241). The leadership rests upon affective action or love
for the leader and a belief that the leader is extraordinary. Again, this is a sociological
claim of legitimacy based upon the beliefs of the grantees. Normatively this form of
authority is highly questionable. The belief in special powers of those in authority flies
in face of the principle of the equal moral worth of all citizens. It also suggests a willing-
ness on the part of the grantee to suspend critical faculty – the leader knows best mental-
ity. In short, under charismatic leadership the grantee is vulnerable to being duped into
giving authority with relatively little dispositional payback.
Strong collective ideologies based upon a teleological perception of the world in
which the people are encouraged to sacrifice their interests for the long-term benefit of
Haugaard 25
some higher good generate effective authority as a social fact. However, this is norma-
tively suspected because the visionary ideology renders the people a means to a greater
(purported) good that transcends the people. This is especially evident when the ideology
has strongly emphasized collective elements such as nationalism. Confronted with such
an ideology, the grantee of authority is quite likely to view their episodic and disposi-
tional powerlessness as an altruistic act for the greater good of the collective. They can
be convinced that their sacrifice for a (so-called) higher good is a virtuous act. Thus
being a means to an end, abject, a virtual slave, becomes a virtue. Again, if the sacrifice
is for some higher collective goal, this is a form of domination in which those with
authority see themselves as acting altruistically. Thus, this can be a particularly difficult
form of sociologically legitimate but normatively illegitimate authority to undermine
because the abjection of the grantee appears as virtue and sacrifice.
The concepts of sociological authority and normative authority entail two distinct
claims. This is a complex theme but suffice it to say that many everyday forms of domi-
nation are sociologically legitimate while normatively illegitimate. This takes place even
within democratic systems where the electorate can be manipulated into granting author-
ity to populist charismatic leaders or they can be persuaded by extreme, often collective
nationalist, ideologies to legitimize authority that deprives them or others of long-term
dispositional power. Today, these issues are current in many countries with liberal demo-
cratic institutions, including Russia (Putin), Turkey (Erdogan), Britain (Brexit) and the
United States (Trump).
Conclusion
I began this article by examining the perspectives of Weber, Arendt and Raz which I
used as reference point to frame the problem of authority relative to two ways of con-
ceptualizing authority: sociologically (as a fact of the social world) and normatively
(how authority can be justified). From the sociological arguments, we learned that
authority entails agency that comes from performative acts that appear epistemically
reasonable. In that sense, authority is legitimate relative to an interpretative horizon
(3-D power) which defines the conditions of possibility (2-D power) of the felicitous
performance of an act of authority. The interpretative aspect of authority is common to
all forms of authority including its everyday forms. In the literature, there is a tendency
to focus purely upon authority as power-over but, by using the exemplar of the author-
ity-less Primo Levi, we see that authority lies at the core of agency. This emphasis upon
power-to leads to the normative argument. Fundamentally, authority exists for the pur-
poses of agency.
Taking a neo-Kantian, republican, pragmatist turn, we see that the normative founda-
tion of authority is justified relative to the purpose of authority which is to empower the
social actors who grant that authority. We face the anarchist challenge to liberalism (that
authority entails power-over and therefore is inconsistent with freedom) by distinguish-
ing between episodic and dispositional powers. Essentially, episodic power-over can
empower on a dispositional level, even for the less powerful grantee of authority.
Normatively justified episodic power-over authority should deliver dispositional power-
to, even for the worst off. The democratic process, expert authority, bureaucratic and
other forms of authority are examined for their potential to deliver power-to under spe-
cific circumstances. This analysis is constantly qualified by the observation that practice
rarely lives up to ideal types, and that authority is not an either/or phenomenon rather
both/and. In other words, authority is not either normatively legitimate or illegitimate.
Rather, it is more legitimate or less legitimate.
This article concludes by comparing sociological legitimacy and normative legiti-
macy, arguing that the two are often at variance with each other. Often what actors
consider legitimate may not be normatively defensible, relative to the normative crite-
ria underpinning the overlapping consensus of liberal democracy. So, for instance,
charismatic authority is one of the forms of authority that can have the highest levels
of legitimacy as a social fact (sociologically) but the tendency to blind adherence,
which confers that very legitimacy, can be a hindrance to critical evaluation of the ends
served by the charismatic authority. Consequently, there is a tendency for the empow-
erment of the charismatic leader to become the normative end rather than the empow-
erment of the less powerful. Hence, in charismatic authority, there exists the potential
for an inverse relationship between sociological and normative legitimacies. The same
applies to other forms of authority including legal and traditional authority under cer-
tain circumstances.
Overall, I hope that by weaving sociological and normative theory together, we can
develop theory that is grounded in reality yet normatively useful. Thus I have brought is
and ought into a symbiotic tension with significant potential for synthesis. The tension is
unavoidable and is one that we must be vigilant for, and the synthesis is always incom-
plete therefore never reaches closure. Acknowledgement of these limits makes this the-
ory intrinsically anti-utopian, both in the sense that it is grounded in reality and that
perfect normative legitimacy is shown to be an illusion – a dangerous one.
Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges the insightful comments made by colleagues at the Prague Conference
of critical theory, May 2016, and at the International Political Science Association research group
on Political Power (RC 36) interim meeting held in Pavia, May 2017. The author would also like
to thank the anonymous referees of the Journal of Classical Sociology for their perspicacious
suggestions.
Notes
1. I have substituted A and B for A and Y in the original quotation because this is the convention
in the power debates – A is powerful and B is the object of A’s power.
2. Anecdotally, I have been informed that during the German occupation of Denmark, under the
instigation of the resistance, children used to mimic Nazi soldiers goose-stepping down the
street. This was greeted with laughter which served to undermine Nazi authority.
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Author biography
Mark Haugaard is a professor in the School of Political Science and Sociology at the National
University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland. He is the founder editor of the Journal of Political Power,
published by Routledge, and a new book series, Social and Political Power, with Manchester
University Press. He has published extensively upon power, and his publications include (2015)
‘Concerted Power Over’ Constellations: An international journal of critical and democratic the-
ory, 22(1): 147-158; (2016) and ‘Two types of freedom and four dimensions of power’, in Revue
Internationale de Philosophie, 275: 37-65. He is currently working on a monograph entitled Social
and Political Power, for Manchester University Press.
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The phenomenon of authority can be analysed from a number of perspectives. Most

Three perspectives on authority

1. Rational grounds. ‘resting on a belief in the legality of normative rules’ (Weber,

We should consider authority as an ideal type that is on two oppositional scales as

1. Authority is the opposite of violence and coercion.

1. Authority ‘legitimates the exercise of power’;

As will be demonstrated below, I consider the distinctions that Arendt draws

The sociological perspective

1) that the ship was not thereby named;

2) that it is an infernal shame

The justification of authority exists at two levels: it exists epistemically, as reasonable

1. The first-dimension (henceforth 1-D) of power consists of agency, manifest as

Normative aspects of authority

different republican traditions, Arendt similarly suggests that politics is a condition of

positive-sum, there is a feedback from power-over to power-to. In the case of norma-

Sociological authority versus normative authority

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