Auctoritas

Auctoritas is the Latin origin of English "authority". According to Benveniste [citation?], auctor (which also gives us English "author") is derived from Latin augeó ("to augment"): The auctor is is qui auget, the one who augments the act or the juridical situation of another. (J.B. Greenough disputes this etymology of auctor--but not the sense of foundation and augmentation--in "Latin Etymologies", Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 4, 1893.)

Auctor in the sense of "author", comes from auctor as founder or, one might say, "planter-cultivator". Similarly, auctoritas refers to rightful ownership, based on one's having "produced" the article of property in question--more in the sense of "sponsored" or "acquired" than "manufactured". (See "Hannah Arendt On Auctoritas" below.) This auctoritas would, for example, persist through an usucapion of ill-gotten property.

In the private domain, those under tutelage (guardianship), such as women and minors, were similarly obliged to seek the sanction of their tutors ("protectors") for certain actions. Thus, auctoritas characterizes the auctor: The pater familias authorizes--that is, validates and legitimates--his son's wedding in prostate. In this way, auctoritas might function as a kind of "passive counsel", much as, for example, a scholarly authority.

Representation of a sitting of the Roman Senate: Cicero attacks Catilina, from a 19th century fresco

Politically, auctoritas referred to the Roman Senate's authority, as opposed to power--potestas or imperium, which were held by the magistrates or the people. Auctoritas is thus the juridical power to authorize some other act--in and of itself, it has no sense. (In dialectic terms, law--more generally, right--doubles and recovers life.)

The 19th-century classicist Theodor Mommsen describes the "force" of auctoritas as "more than advice and less than command, an advice which one may not safely ignore." Cicero says of power and authority, "Cum potestas in populo auctoritas in senatu sit." ("While power resides in the people, authority rests with the Senate.")

Hannah Arendt On Auctoritas

Hannah Arendt considers auctoritas a reference to founding acts as the source of political authority in Ancient Rome, taking foundation to include, (as augére suggests), the continuous conservation and increase of principles handed down from "the beginning", (hence, pietas). According to Arendt, this source of authority was rediscovered in the course of the 18th-century American Revolution, (see "United States of America" under Founding Fathers), as an alternative to an intervening Western tradition of absolutism, claiming absolute authority, as from God, (see Divine Right of Kings), and later from Nature, Reason, History, and even, as in the French Revolution, Revolution itself. (See Le Terreur.) Arendt views a crisis of authority as common to both the American and French Revolutions, and the response to that crisis a key factor in the relative success of the former and failure of the latter.

Arendt further considers the sense of auctor and auctoritas in various Latin idioms, and the fact that auctor was used in contradistinction to--and, (at least by Pliny), held in higher esteem than--artifices, the artisans to whom it might fall to "merely" build up or implement the author-founder's vision and design.

Giorgio Agamben On Auctoritas

Philosopher Giorgio Agamben suggests a relationship between the Roman auctoritas, Max Weber's "charismatic power", and Carl Schmitt's theoretical/ideological basis for the Nazi Führertum doctrine. Agamben compares auctoritas to the Führer (who embodies nomos empsuchon or "living law") in their relationship to the observance of gramma (written law).(More at Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception.)

See also

• Authority
• Authoritarianism
• Roman law
• Giorgio Agamben
• Hannah Arendt
• Dignitas
• Gravitas
• Pietas

References

• Cicero, De Legibus (1st century BC)
• Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (2005)
• Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, Chapter 3, Section IV. (1968)
• Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, Chapter 5, Section 2. (1965)
• Theodor Mommsen, Römisches Staatsrecht, Volume III, Chapter 2. (1887)
• William Smith, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. (1875, 1890 editions)

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