DEMOCRATIC AUTHORITY AS REPUDIATION OF SELF-AUTHORIZATION

Any form of government might hold authority for a given population at a particular time, and any form of government might also secure authority over it. Very evidently, for many populations and very much of the time, no form of government at all enjoys the first or can elicit the second. Authority over is behavioral – a matter of power; but authority for is inherently normative. It requires belief, attitude, and sentiment, and though power may generate it or issue from it, it can never in itself be simply a fact of power and is never reducible to a repertoire of behavior. What makes democracy such a hazardous category in contemporary political assessment (in striking contrast to three centuries ago) is precisely what makes it so seductive to deploy for that purpose: its constant flickering equivocation between the positive and the normative. The latent dual pretension of contemporary democracy is that under it and it alone, the personnel who govern, the people who hold power, do so solely because they provenly hold authority for their power to do so, whereas under democracy and democracy alone, those they govern can rely on being ruled without any particular human beings holding authority over them. The ideological allure of this combination thus adroitly synthesizes the blitheness of anarchy with the security of civil order. Actually existing democracies, unsurprisingly, have a more checkered record either of authority for or authority over the populations they enfold.

The very idea of a state requires authority over a given territory and population. Those states unable to achieve it have failed not merely in contemporary political nomenclature but all too palpably and by criteria they cannot coherently disavow. The extraordinarily complex articulations of the state idea which still provide the most obtrusive and consequential format for human collective life across those areas of the globe where such life occurs on any scale and enjoys a format of significant extent undoubtedly vary dramatically.