31 results
Sixteen - The moral crusade against paedophilia
-
- By Frank Furedi
- Edited by Viviene E. Cree, Gary Clapton, The University of Edinburgh, Mark Smith, University of Dundee
-
- Book:
- Revisiting Moral Panics
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 08 March 2022
- Print publication:
- 30 June 2015, pp 201-210
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
The focus of this essay is the transformation of the threat of paedophilia into a permanent focus of moral outrage. It explores the moral landscape that has turned the child predator into the principal target of moral enterprise. Through a discussion of the concept of a moral crusade it evaluates the impact of society's obsessive preoccupation with the child predator.
Paedophilia and the threat it represents to children has become a permanent feature of public concern and a regular theme of popular culture. The paedophile personifies evil in 21st-century society; the child predator possesses the stand-alone status of the embodiment of malevolence. But this unique personification of evil is not an isolated figure hovering on the margins of 21st-century society. Jimmy Savile, who died in 2011 and who has not been out of the news during the past two years, was dubbed the most ‘prolific’ paedophile in British history. What is unique about the activities of this alleged celebrity predator is the scale of his operation rather than his behaviour. Allegations against Savile effortlessly acquired the status of a cultural truth, since it is widely believed that, rather than rare, the abuse of children is a very common activity.
According to the cultural script of virtually every western society, child abusers are ubiquitous. This script invites the public to regard all strangers – particularly men – as potential child molesters. The concept of ‘stranger danger’ and the campaigns that promote it have as their explicit objective the educating of children to mistrust adults that they do not know. This narrative of stranger danger helps to turn what ought to be the unthinkable into an omnipresent threat that preys on our imagination. Represented as a universal threat, the peril of paedophilia demands perpetual vigilance. The expectation that adult strangers represent a risk to children has in effect turned concern about paedophilia into a very normal feature of life. That is why physical contact between adults and children has become so intensely scrutinised and policed.
Frontmatter
- Frank Furedi, University of Kent, Canterbury
-
- Book:
- Authority
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 12 September 2013, pp i-iv
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Conclusion: final thoughts
- Frank Furedi, University of Kent, Canterbury
-
- Book:
- Authority
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 12 September 2013, pp 403-409
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Authority has never been entirely a taken-for-granted institution. Even during the Middle Ages, often described as an epoch of tradition and religion, competing claims to authority had a significant impact on public life. Yet the questions raised by medieval claims-makers appealed to a shared religious and cultural legacy and did not fundamentally query the authority of authority. In the centuries to follow, the range of issues subjected to competing claims has both expanded and assumed a more profound quality. Claims-making has always been a competitive enterprise; but this competition has become complicated by the fact that the authority or authorities it appeals to today are also intensely contested. Who speaks on behalf of the child or the victim? Whose account of global warming is authoritative? Those in authority look for the authorisation of others to validate their claims. Scientists and advocacy organisations seek alliances with authoritative celebrities. Governments appeal to the evidence of experts to justify their policies, as illustrated in the way that government initiatives are usually accompanied by ‘new research’ that legitimises such policies. As Giddens notes, in the absence of ‘determinant authorities’, there ‘exist plenty of claimants to authority – far more than was true of pre-modern cultures’.
The proliferation of competing claims-making is a symptom of the difficulty that society has in elaborating a shared narrative of validation. Historically, the question of how to validate and give meaning to authority has been posed and answered in different ways. The contrast between the explicit assertion of auctoritas by Augustus or Pope Gregory, and the current tendency to evade the question, highlights the transformation of the workings of authority over the centuries. The last historical moment that there was an explicit attempt to recover and assert a politicised conception of foundation for authority – the inter-war era of the 1920s and 1930s – led to its ‘revival’ in the caricatured form of authoritarianism. The experience of these decades continues to haunt discussions of authority, and shape the way that it is conceptualised in public life.
8 - Hobbes and the problem of order
- Frank Furedi, University of Kent, Canterbury
-
- Book:
- Authority
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 12 September 2013, pp 181-205
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The problem of establishing a compelling foundational norm for authority has haunted modern society since the seventeenth century. Virtually every political crisis has been accompanied by a sense of uncertainty about how to secure a legitimate grounding for power. The clarity with which Thomas Hobbes grasped the meaning of this issue, and his understanding of the need for a fundamentally novel form of authorisation, endows his contribution with an enduring legacy. Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) represents one of the most ambitious attempts to rethink the relationship between power and authority, and time and again it would be looked to for inspiration. As the political scientist Richard Flathman writes:
IF there is a single most perspicuous account or analysis of the concept of authority, and IF there is a single most compelling normative conception of authority, then that account and that conception find their origin and one of their most forceful articulations in the writings of Thomas Hobbes.
Unlike most of his contemporaries, Hobbes comprehended the scale of the socioeconomic and political change that divided his era from medieval times. The upheaval of European society, particularly that of his own strife-ridden England, forced Hobbes to understand that previous varieties of traditional authority could not be revived.
What is particularly interesting about Hobbes's political theory is that, as well as constructing a new argument for the validation of a stable order, he offered a critique of the failure of previous foundational norms on which authority was based. Although dominated by the issues that directly confronted him, the very attempt to distance his Leviathan from past conceptions of authority illustrates a very modern sensibility. Hobbes's historical critique of authority is directed at the ‘orthodoxy developed by the Christian tradition’ that made ‘the rightness of opinion’ the foundation for authority. Hobbes claimed that such opinions, which were interpreted by groups of priests, intellectuals and lawyers, inevitably led to conflicts of dogma, with destructive consequences. Kraynak notes that ‘the conclusion of Hobbes's historical writings, therefore, is that civilization had been characterized by the establishment of authoritative opinions and the disputation of these opinions, rendering it not merely unstable but positively self-destructive’.
3 - Rome and the founding of authority
- Frank Furedi, University of Kent, Canterbury
-
- Book:
- Authority
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 12 September 2013, pp 47-69
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The idea of political authority gained shape and definition during the evolution of the Roman Republic. Although the meaning of political concepts are subject to historical variations, it is in Rome that many themes and problems associated with the modern understanding of authority – tradition, religion, morality, competing visions of the past – emerged with force. As one review of the history of this idea concluded:
There is common agreement that the idea of authority, in the full range of meanings that have given it an integral intellectual life to the present, has its origins during the Roman Republic with the coinage of the distinctive term, auctoritas, to cover several kinds of primarily, albeit not exclusively legal relationships.
Roman society was no less subject to the upheavals brought by change than the Greek city states. However, as Arendt notes, while Greek philosophy tended to take change for granted, the Romans expressly attempted to consolidate a powerful sense of tradition and continuity. The Romans continually wrote about their past and were self-consciously devoted to their ancestors, traditions and customs. This played an important role in the construction of a unique Roman sensibility towards authority.
But the social upheavals brought about through imperial expansion, competition and rivalry within the ruling elites and unrest from below meant that Romans could not take authority for granted. Questions to do with who had authority and how it should be exercised dominated public life during the final two centuries of the Republic. Such questions were posed with increasing urgency during a series of civil wars that threatened the very integrity of Roman political institutions.
7 - Reformation and the emergence of the problem of order
- Frank Furedi, University of Kent, Canterbury
-
- Book:
- Authority
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 12 September 2013, pp 149-180
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The sixteenth-century Reformation Movement helped to create the conditions for the final unravelling of medieval authority. This movement can be interpreted as at once a cause, a response and expression of the moral crisis of the Roman Church. That Luther's break with the Roman Church coincided with the emergence of soon-to-be nation states ensured that controversies over religious doctrines would intersect with secular political conflicts. The ferocity of theological conflict and its destructive divisive impact had the long-term effect of forcing European society to look for an authoritative solution to the problem of endemic disorder and insecurity. Since violent conflicts of interests were expressed through religious disputes, the search for order was drawn towards secular solutions; and as Hegel remarked, ‘states and communities had arrived at the consciousness of independent moral worth’. As a result authority gradually divested itself of its outward religious appearance and assumed a political form. In the post-Reformation era, authority became increasingly politicised and gradually attached itself to the sovereign nation state.
Unintended shattering of authority
The gradual erosion of the Universalist foundation for medieval authority was the inevitable consequence of the growing salience of national, or at least territorial, consciousness. Until the sixteenth century this consciousness lacked the confidence to express its aspiration through an explicit claim for secular sovereignty. But from the late medieval period onwards, trends towards the weakening of the papacy over temporal matters, the centralisation of territorial institutions, and the crisis of the universal Church were working towards the demise of the medieval idea of authority. The most significant influence at work in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was the rising criticism of the moral standing of the Church, which ultimately led to the demise of Christian unity and papal authority.
Index
- Frank Furedi, University of Kent, Canterbury
-
- Book:
- Authority
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 12 September 2013, pp 438-446
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Contents
- Frank Furedi, University of Kent, Canterbury
-
- Book:
- Authority
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 12 September 2013, pp v-vi
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Preface
- Frank Furedi, University of Kent, Canterbury
-
- Book:
- Authority
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 12 September 2013, pp vii-viii
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
During the past two decades I have been preoccupied with the difficulty that Western culture has in giving meaning to authority. In a number of studies I explored the different manifestations of this problem in relation to issues such as disputes over child-rearing, scientific advice or who to trust in public life. From these studies I became aware of the absence of a serious account of the cultural devaluation of an idea that once constituted a central category of philosophy, political theory and of my own discipline of sociology. This study attempts to find answers through the sociological investigation of the concept of authority.
During the past five years I have attempted to understand how authority emerged, evolved and changed through different historical periods. This work of historical sociology represents an attempt to mobilise the experience of the past to help explain why authority today has such an elusive quality. The story begins with the Homeric legend and leads up to our present day predicament. Hopefully, through providing a historical context for the constitution of the problem of authority, it will allow twenty-first-century readers to interpret the relation between society and authority in a new way. I believe that history provides a unique vantage point for understanding the different symptoms of the crisis of authority. Studying and maybe diagnosing those symptoms will be the subject of my next book on this area.
6 - Medieval claim-making and the sociology of tradition
- Frank Furedi, University of Kent, Canterbury
-
- Book:
- Authority
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 12 September 2013, pp 124-148
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Medieval political life during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was dominated by the problem of the constitution of authority. According to one account, the twelfth century felt this concern with a ‘new intensity, rarely matched during the centuries intervening since the death of Augustine in 430’. Old dynasties searched for a new foundation for their authority, papal officials sought to expand the role of Rome in Europe's temporal affairs and advocates of city autonomy were busy constructing arguments for their independence. Within medieval urban centres, noted Weber, ‘numerous claims to authority stand side by side, overlapping and often conflicting with each other’. The authority of Roman law competed with that of feudal Germanic custom and Christian doctrine, and medieval lawyers had to integrate these ‘three systems of thought’ and reconcile their potentially contradictory claims to authority. As one study of medieval law observes:
Perhaps their most difficult task was to accommodate a conception of kingship that rested on divine foundations, derived in part from Roman and in part from Christian thought, with Germanic and feudal kingship, which based its claim to legitimacy on the relationship of the king to his barons and people.
In the prosperous commercial centres of Italy, rapid social and economic change created a condition of fluidity and instability that tested the influence of traditional authority. In such ‘relatively unstable circumstances with competing authority claims’, the traditional ruler's authority was often displaced or ‘usurped’ by popular associations led by a new class of prosperous merchants. This urban revolution was frequently legitimised by the construction of legal precedents and procedures. The Italian jurist Bartolus de Saxoferrato (1314–1357) developed the idea of popular consent from customary law, representing custom as an expression of people's consent and an important constituent of legitimation. Bartolus's main innovation was his attribution ‘to the independent city-populus within its territory the jurisdictional powers which the emperor possessed within the empire as a whole’. Although he recognised parallel jurisdictions derived from imperial and papal sources, his development of the role of consent helped to consolidate the idea of city-state sovereignty.
11 - Taming public opinion and the quest for authority
- Frank Furedi, University of Kent, Canterbury
-
- Book:
- Authority
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 12 September 2013, pp 247-272
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The nineteenth century was frequently perceived as an era of transition between the relatively stable world of pre-revolutionary Europe and an uncertain age where the outlines of what authority would look like in the future was difficult to discern. This was a question that preoccupied political commentators and also dominated the agenda of the emerging discipline of sociology.
For public commentators associated with the rising middle class in the nineteenth century, the notion of public opinion was central to a narrative through which both the problem of authority and its potential solutions could be conceptualised. In the aftermath of the upheavals of the previous century, traditional arguments about the sanctity of hierarchy and authority lost much of their capacity to motivate society. In any case, the aspirations of the urban middle classes were inconsistent with a hierarchy based on birth. Many of them sought to consolidate their status through claiming moral and intellectual leadership over public opinion. However, the project of influencing opinion constantly raised questions about its relationship to authority.
Authority
- A Sociological History
- Frank Furedi
-
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 12 September 2013
-
Concern with authority is as old as human history itself. Eve's sin was to challenge the authority of God by disobeying his rule. Frank Furedi explores how authority was contested in ancient Greece and given a powerful meaning in Imperial Rome. Debates about religious and secular authority dominated Europe through the Middle Ages and the Reformation. The modern world attempted to develop new foundations for authority – democratic consent, public opinion, science – yet Furedi shows that this problem has remained unresolved, arguing that today the authority of authority is questioned. This historical sociology of authority seeks to explain how the contemporary problems of mistrust and the loss of legitimacy of many institutions are informed by the previous attempts to solve the problem of authority. It argues that the key pioneers of the social sciences (Marx, Durkheim, Simmel, Tonnies and especially Weber) regarded this question as one of the principal challenges facing society.
9 - The rationalisation of authority
- Frank Furedi, University of Kent, Canterbury
-
- Book:
- Authority
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 12 September 2013, pp 206-228
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Hobbes sought to address the problem of order through reconciling the aspiration for individual liberty with the reality of absolutist rule. Despite his realistic advocacy of absolutist sovereignty, his recognition of the natural liberty of the individual situates him as one of the key influences on modern liberalism. Hobbes grasped that in his time, competing versions of authority made the task of gaining consensus about its meaning problematic. He provided a very early account of the threat that dissident intellectuals and ideologically inspired religious groups could represent to the maintenance of order, and in this sense his criticism of the role of intellectuals and universities during the English Civil War anticipated the subsequent tendency to blame the philosophes and other intellectuals for the breakdown of authority in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
One of the unique features of Hobbes's political philosophy was its realistic representation of domination and authority as the accomplishment of the political will. Although Hobbes was conscious of the need to ensure that his Leviathan provided security and order for individuals and their property, his absolutist emphasis was not quite congruent with the demands of the rapidly expanding commercial society. The modernising economies of Europe required new freedoms for the pursuit of commerce and trade and its advocates demanded restraints on the activities of the state.
1 - Thersites and the personification of anti-authority
- Frank Furedi, University of Kent, Canterbury
-
- Book:
- Authority
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 12 September 2013, pp 16-30
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Storytellers have been fascinated with the subject of authority since the birth of Western literature. The model of authority that prevailed in Homer's great epic the Iliad, written in the eighth century BC, is one where the authority of the king was ‘anchored in the authoritative decree of the king of Gods’, Zeus, who ‘commissions an earthly king to share his sovereign rule’. A king represented his rule as authorised by divine forces. The exercise of royal leadership required creativity and intelligence: it was not sufficient to be commissioned for the role of king by a divine power; the king had to demonstrate that his leadership could benefit the community and win favour with the gods. Consequently the king could increase or decrease his personal authority through the quality of his leadership.
The dominant influence of the aristocratic-warrior code ensured that acts of courage and prowess on the battlefield formed the foundation of individual authority. When the Greek hero Achilles derides Agamemnon's record as a warrior, he reminds the assembled gathering of prominent warriors that their leader did not earn his authority through a display of courage: ‘never once have you taken courage in your heart to arm with your people for battle’. Agamemnon's position of kingly authority rests on his wealth and command over a large body of warriors, but his behaviour indicates that he lacks valour and rhetorical skills, the qualities that the Greeks associated with authoritative leadership. From this point onwards we all know that the angry exchange of insults between these two men will not be the last time that Agamemnon's authority will be contested.
Introduction: always in question
- Frank Furedi, University of Kent, Canterbury
-
- Book:
- Authority
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 12 September 2013, pp 1-15
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
When the word ‘authority’ in its original Latin form was used as a form of self-description by Augustus, the Emperor of Rome, his aim was to communicate the possession of something far more important than mere military or political power. His self-conscious reference to his unique auctoritas sought to draw attention to a far more compelling attribute, which was a dignified moral authority. Augustus's implied distinction between power and auctoritas spoke to a world that had begun to understand that something more than force was needed to maintain order and cohesion.
Since Augustus's time there have been continual attempts to claim the possession of something more than power. Yet time and again, societies have found it difficult to find an adequate way of conceptualising this. In England at least, it was not until the seventeenth century that a new language was created to respond the unsettled political realities sought to distinguish conceptually between authority and power. One pamphleteer in 1642 drew attention to the distinction between the two terms which, he claimed, were ‘commonly confounded and obscure the whole business’. However, the absence of a language to contrast power and authority does not mean that the distinction itself was absent from Western political culture. The historian Leonard Krieger has argued that what was significant and distinct about ‘the Christian dimension of authority’ was its independence from political power: while ‘medieval men’ would use the terms ‘interchangeably in many contexts’, a ‘context was established for the separation of authority from power’. And certainly, the distinction between authority and power has been an integral component to Western political theory for well over two millennia. ‘The most fundamental of all distinctions in political thought is the distinction between ‘force’ or ‘violence’ and ‘authority’; between potential, which is physical, and potestas or auctoritas, which is mental; between ‘might’ and ‘right’’, argues the political theorist, Michael Oakeshott.
14 - The rise of negative theories of authority
- Frank Furedi, University of Kent, Canterbury
-
- Book:
- Authority
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 12 September 2013, pp 328-349
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In the nineteenth century, authority was conceptualised as an institution founded on society. From the turn of the twentieth century, a turn in the thinking about this subject becomes evident. This shift was most vividly expressed in influential theories asserting that consent provided an irrational foundation for authority.
The 1890s is frequently represented as a turning point in attitudes towards modernity, industrialism, technological progress and the future. This period is often portrayed as one of crisis, which ‘changed the intellectual physiognomy of Europe’ and whose destructive consequences had, by 1914, ensured that ‘nothing remained of the proud structure of European certainties’. Radical syndicalist and socialist ideas competed with New Liberal social engineers for the soul of public life; culture reacted against previous ideals of rationality, and new doctrines stressing the role of intuition and the unconscious resonated with the mood of the times.
Although many practising sociologists, such as Hobhouse, Ward and Ross, possessed the social engineering ambitions of turn-of-the-century modernisers, the leading theoreticians of this discipline had internalised a cultural critique of modernity. As we noted in the previous chapter, conceptions of authority drawn from the past appeared to have greater meaning than those drawn from industrialised society. The contrast that Tonnies drew between community and society had echoes of a Romantic sensibility, in which his sense of the vitality and life of a community stood in sharp contrast to the dehumanising forces of change.2 In this era, theories highlighting the antithesis of culture and civilisation gained a significant audience, and technical, scientific and economic advances were frequently contrasted to cultural decline.
10 - The limits of the authority of the rational
- Frank Furedi, University of Kent, Canterbury
-
- Book:
- Authority
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 12 September 2013, pp 229-246
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
From the moment of its ‘discovery’, public opinion was portrayed as an all-powerful force that no ruler could ignore. In France, discussions surrounding the fate of the Old Regime adopted a tone of reverence towards public opinion; the lawyer and minister Chretien-Guillaume Malesherbes (1721–1799), in his maiden speech to the Académie Française in 1755, expressed the widely held sentiment that a ‘tribunal has arisen independent of powers and that all powers respect, that appreciates all talents, that pronounces on all people of merit’. This view that public opinion was the highest court in the life of the nation communicated the idea that henceforth only those who could represent or give voice to this new force could claim to possess real authority. Strictly speaking, the eighteenth-century idea that ‘opinion rules’ should be understood as the recognition of an important development, in which the validation of opinion becomes increasingly essential to the capacity to govern.
At first sight it is difficult to understand why public opinion was assigned such power by political thinkers. To be sure this era saw the expansion of the educated and professional classes, particularly in Western Europe, and the growth of printing and the press created a public that could develop its beliefs and ideas through accessing alternative sources of knowledge and information. However, despite its influence on intellectual and cultural life, public opinion was as much a construction of claim-makers as feature of material reality. The precondition for delineating opinion as an independent source of authority was the autonomisation of ideas and beliefs from established traditional sources. Belief could no longer be monopolised in circumstances where the contestation of knowledge had become the norm; and since opinion could not be taken for granted it had to be discovered, voiced and represented.
15 - By passing authority through the rationalisation of persuasion
- Frank Furedi, University of Kent, Canterbury
-
- Book:
- Authority
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 12 September 2013, pp 350-375
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
It is worth recalling that modern utilitarian and liberal theory emerged in the eighteenth century on the supposition that the ‘foundation of order in society is reason in individuals’. The belief that persuasion rather than force constituted the foundation of order had as its premise the belief that, through free speech and communication, the public could be influenced to act in accordance with reason and their interest. Moreover, the liberal utilitarian theories of the eighteenth century regarded the ‘development of public opinion as a constituent component of social order’. Such optimistic sentiments towards the role of public opinion were antithetical to the subsequent psychological turn in political thought, and its claim that order was founded on irrational and non-rational sentiments.
In sociological theories the problem posed by the power of irrational forces was linked to an interpretation of the process of modernisation, or rationalisation. The disruptive impact of the erosion of tradition was linked to a state of anomie or normlessness, which in turn fostered a climate of existential insecurity. As Weber's own theory indicated, rationalisation has a corrosive effect on the foundation on which authority is exercised. This insight was developed by Talcott Parsons in the 1930s and 1940s to explain both the perilous threat facing liberal democracies and the influence of authoritarian power. After pointing out that the very development of ‘rational-legal patterns’ undermined ‘many of the values which have played an important part in our past history’, Parsons warned that the erosion of these traditional sources of authority represents ‘one of the most important sources of widespread insecurity’.
4 - Augustus: a role model for authority through the ages
- Frank Furedi, University of Kent, Canterbury
-
- Book:
- Authority
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 12 September 2013, pp 70-94
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Rome provided the intellectual resources for rendering authority meaningful. It is frequently observed that auctoritas is a ‘uniquely Roman idea’. This does not mean that the Romans discovered authority, but that they self-consciously reflected on it and attempted to conceptualise its different dimensions. In particular, through distinguishing between potestas, the power to command, and auctoritas, the Romans succeeded in representing authority ‘in terms of a procedure of authorization’. Moreover, the Romans turned their political experiences into a durable legacy that others would draw on. As the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott notes,
this political experience generated a legend of itself in which actions and events acquired poetically universal significance – a legend unmatched until quite modern times, in which the Romans expressed their beliefs about themselves as a community and about what they were doing in the world.
Over the past two millennia Rome has served as source of authority for a variety of political rulers, religious leaders, revolutionaries and philosophers. The influence of Rome did not only transcend national boundaries but also the political divide. Conservative thinkers dreaming of a restoration of order were no less drawn towards finding inspiration from the legacy of Rome than were radical revolutionaries aspiring to the building a new world. ‘Law, order, reverence for authority, the whole framework of political and social establishment, are the work of Rome on the lines drawn once for all by the Latin genius’, noted the Scottish socialist and Virgil scholar, John William Mackaill, in his address to the Classical Association in 1904. Similar thoughts were expressed by his more conservative-thinking colleagues, who equated Rome with permanence, stability and order.
To this day, diagnoses of political issues and problems are often mediated through reflections on the experience of Rome. It is as if the appropriation of Roman legend, ideals and symbols is necessary for re-discovering the meaning of authority in very different circumstances, and in line with different historical and cultural sentiments. Those whose focus is the representation or consolidation of authority have frequently turned to Augustus for guidance. It is a testimony to the accomplishment of Augustus that the historical quest for validation and legitimation has time and again sought to clarify its own views and learn from the experience of the Principate.
12 - Nineteenth-century authority on the defensive
- Frank Furedi, University of Kent, Canterbury
-
- Book:
- Authority
- Published online:
- 05 June 2014
- Print publication:
- 12 September 2013, pp 273-298
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The defensive discourse on public opinion offered a medium through which anxieties about the cultural and moral devaluation of authority could be communicated. In the nineteenth century the loss of cultural support for authority was shown by the fact that it was increasingly presented as a principle that was inferior to freedom. Moreover, the couplets of Authority versus Truth and Authority versus Reason cast doubts on its moral and intellectual credibility. The erosion of cultural valuation for authority was captured rhetorically through concepts such as ‘the principle of authority’ and ‘authoritarian’.
The language through which authority was expressed had become ambiguous and evasive. This trend was exemplified in the nineteenth century through the concept ‘principle of authority’, which, though frequently used in public discussions and the press, was rarely defined. For example, London's The Times referred to the principle of authority in a manner that suggested its readers would readily understand the term. In France, the term la principe d'authorité was used by the leading anarchist Proudhon, and in Germany, the word Autoritätsprinzip was widely used by theologians and social commentators. Friedrich Engels referred to it in his article ‘On Authority’ and Rudolph Sohm, who influenced the development of Weber's theory of charisma, used the term in his 1892 discussion of charismatic authority.