Authority: what we ask of the one who decides

Power is the capacity to obtain a certain conduct, by constraint if need be. Authority is the quality that makes a decision followed without constraint being necessary, because it is recognised as legitimate. An institution may have a great deal of power and little authority, and the reverse exists too.

The distinction is not only theoretical: it decides the cost. An accepted rule applies almost without supervision; a rule imposed but not recognised requires controls, sanctions, an administration. Many disagreements about the means of enforcing a rule are in fact disagreements about its legitimacy.

Max Weber distinguished several sources of legitimacy: tradition, the qualities recognised in a person, and the impersonal rule. Most contemporary debates about authority bear on the accepted source, more than on the desirable quantity of authority.

The first expectation is protection: that a decision be taken, quickly, and that it apply to everyone in the same way. It values the clarity of the rule and the capacity to enforce it, including against particular interests and against the powerful.

The second is limitation: that the one who decides cannot do everything, must give reasons for their decisions and can be challenged. It values remedies, the separation of functions, the publicity of reasons.

The same person may hold both expectations with strong intensity, and that is not an inconsistency: it is even the most common position. Demanding that decisions be taken, and demanding that they can be challenged, describes a precise relation to power rather than a hesitation.

The words used in public debate arrange these expectations on a single scale, from laxity to firmness, which makes most real positions unintelligible. A person who calls for harsher sanctions and stronger independent oversight is neither firm nor lax: they are asking for an authority held by rules.

This reduction has a concrete political effect. It pushes each camp to outbid the other on the single axis, and makes invisible the question that decides in practice: by what procedure, and with what remedy.

Three elements clearly modify the answers of people questioned on this subject. The nature of the risk incurred, its perceived probability, and the trust granted to the one who will exercise the power. The third is the most decisive, and the most rarely measured.

That is why the same measure may be approved or refused by the same person depending on the institution exercising it. This is not inconstancy: it is a position on the reliability of the actor, distinct from the position on the measure.

A question of the kind “do we need more authority” mixes the two expectations and produces an answer that is hard to interpret. Useful wordings bear on situations: who decides in an emergency, what remedy exists after the decision, on what conditions a general rule may admit an exception.

Read that way, positions on authority stop arranging themselves from laxity to firmness. They describe what one requires of a decision in order to accept it, which is a question of form as much as of content, and often the more revealing of the two.