ABSTRACT
Continuing the discussion of authority, this chapter focusses specifically on authority within the institutional setting. Therefore, this is primarily a discussion of the authority of the state over its members. This is itself a central political question, and this chapter provides a brief analysis of several key conceptualisations of legitimate political authority. Hannah Arendt, Carl J. Friedrich, and Max Weber provide historical and sociological analyses of authority and use that as the foundation to explain the source and definition of political authority in society. In contrast, Joseph Raz and R. P. Wolff employ a rights-based account of authority and focus on understanding it in relationship with its perceived opposite, autonomy.
The second half of this chapter offers an analysis of attempts to embrace self-governance as a part of an individual’s autonomy and place it coherently within the domain of a legitimate political authority. Following in the footsteps of Rousseau, Dewey, and Freire, democratic education takes centre stage as the means to find this coherence. The discussions focus on theoretical models of democratic education, in particular that developed by Amy Gutmann, and the practical experiment in schools in England and Wales following The Crick Report. The chapter ends with a discussion of the shortcomings of this approach to democratic education which are led by two distinct camps that reach similar conclusions: libertarianism and radical egalitarianism.
