From Authority to Absolute Dominion in Our Administered World

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Authority has traditionally been understood as the dialectical opposite of freedom. According to Anselm of Canterbury, e.g. commitment to faith requires freedom of reason to acquire belief. He asserts that unaided reason cannot succeed in solving questions of ultimate concern. He also asserts that by itself faith is insufficient, since human nature requires both faith and understanding. Essentially, there is a polarity of authority and freedom, as e.g. Karl Jaspers put it. According to Jaspers, freedom can exist only by means of authority: by authority freedom obtains substantiality and thereby is distinguished from arbitrariness. Genuine authority in turn exists only through free commitment; otherwise it is perverted into mere power demanding total obedience, This does not mean that power must be absent from true authority. By power authority gains general validity and temporal duration. Were authority not linked to power, it would oblige only a small elite and this only in rare moments. Power lurks in the background of authority and, if necessary, urges by internal or even by external force. As power in itself is incompatible with freedom, authority and freedom are not simply complementary, but are in tension with each other. Nevertheless, when power has been separated from genuine authority, it tends to deteriorate into despotism, since it no longer requires free consent. Although there is a tension between freedom and authority, as the latter is necessarily linked to power, there is not or should not be an antagonism, because the very essence of authority is to bring about freedom and in so doing to make itself superfluous. True authority encourages initiative and releases creative forces in those subjected to it.