ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the concept of authority, its limits and alternatives. The focus is on specifically political forms of authority, and the chapter begins by exploring the ways in which debates on authority have been central to political theory as a discipline and citizenship as a practice. A fairly standard definition of authority is ‘the right or capacity, or both, to have proposals or prescriptions or instructions accepted without recourse to persuasion, bargaining, or force’ (Reeve 2003a: 30–1). Definitions and debates upon the subject of authority invariably include some reference to legitimacy: authority is differentiated from power since it is in some sense justified or ‘right’ (Heywood 1999: 130; Christiano 2004), or simply believed to be justified or right by those who are motivated to act by authority (Weber 1948: 324). Marshall and Bottomore define the political element of citizenship as ‘the right to participate in the exercise of political power, as a member of a body invested with political authority or as an elector of the members of such a body’ (Marshall and Bottomore 1992 [1949]: 8). These preliminary definitions imply that through the institution of citizenship, political authority is made legitimate since it reflects decisions made by the body upon which authority is to be exercised. Authority is thus widely considered an essential basis for politics and citizenship, and the chapter will consider the limitations of, and alternatives to, foundational political thought from a critical utopian standpoint in theory and practice. I begin by outlining dominant theorizations of the concept of authority, with literature drawn from the canon of political theory. Most accounts of authority, even when they are explicitly critical and view it as essentially contested or variable through time, do not consider that a society without any kind of authority is possible (see for example Pateman 1985: 135; Connolly 1993: 134). Three posited foundations for the legitimacy of political authority recur throughout contemporary literature: contractual consent, democratic representation and instrumentalism (Connolly 1993: 107–16; Green 1998: 585; Christiano 2004: 245–6). Although these are analytically distinct forms of justification for authority, in practice they overlap and intertwine. The structure of the first part of this chapter will be based on these categories, along with a fourth category drawn out as a common assumption of all theories of authority – hierarchy and the subordination of the autonomy of the individual to the state, another individual or a community. This critique is drawn from anarchism, which rejects all forms of authority over the individual, and in so doing helps us to conceptualize the limits of authority. The second part of the chapter considers ‘critical utopian’ alternatives that imagine or desire an outside or beyond to authority, and political formations that assume authority, yet without attempting to formulate a totalizing or transcendental vision. The final part of the chapter considers practices in autonomous communities and their implications for politics and citizenship.
