ABSTRACT
There are good reasons as well as personal excuses for ushering in Hobbes at the outset of a discussion on "authority", for Hobbes himself introduced the concept to deal with difficult problems connected with the analysis of human institutions. The de jure concept of authority presupposes a system of rules which determines who may legitimately take certain types of decision, make certain sorts of pronouncements, issue commands of a certain sort, and perform certain types of symbolic acts. The concept of "authority" is obviously derived from the old concepts of "auctor" and "auctoritas". Max Weber stresses the importance of success as a necessary condition for the maintenance of charismatic authority. The main function of the term "authority" in the analysis of a social situation is to stress these ways of regulating behavior by certain types of utterance in contrast to other ways of regulating behavior.
