Relation to authority

Governing by law and punishment yields at best subjects who avoid the penalty without blushing at the fault: coercion regulates acts but leaves hearts untouched, and the order so kept stays external and fragile. Governing by virtue and example, by contrast, gives a sense of shame and a reformed heart, hence an obedience that comes of itself. This is Confucianism's decisive argument against the Legalists: the hierarchical authority it embraces, of ruler and of father alike, is legitimate only as moral and benevolent, never as arbitrary domination, for its efficacy lies in its power to attract rather than to compel.

Confucius, Analects (Lunyu), 2.1 · Confucius, Analects (Lunyu), 2.3

Kant asserts a duty to obey the established power and denies any right of resistance or revolution, even against an unjust sovereign, since overturning the constitution would ruin the rule of law itself. The citizen retains the freedom to criticise publicly in writing, but must obey.

Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Right, §49 · An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?

Political authority is for Thomas legitimate and natural, since even a state of innocence would have required a direction of the whole toward the common good. But this authority is not absolute: it is bound to serve the common good and remains subject to the natural law; an unjust law, contrary to the good or to the divine law, does not bind in conscience and is no longer a law but a kind of violence. Hence a position favourable to authority, yet bounded by a higher norm that judges it.

Summa Theologiae, Ia-IIae, q. 96, a. 4 (the unjust law)

The state is no educator and has no moral end: it arises from the contract by which frightened egoisms, reckoning that they lose more by suffering wrong than they gain by doing it, give themselves a common muzzle. Necessary against human malice, it is thereby legitimate and without grandeur, and anarchism, which bets on a natural goodness, is a chimera.

The World as Will and Representation, §62

Odysseus is no scorner of order: he is the lawful king of Ithaca, and his whole return aims to restore a legitimate authority usurped by the suitors. He commands, demands obedience from his own, re-establishes the hierarchy of hearth and kingdom; where Antigone sets conscience against power, he embodies the legitimate power that takes back its due, even though the final peace is sealed only by the intervention of Athena, a sign that this restoration still partly escapes him.

Odyssey, XXI-XXII (the contest of the bow and the retaking of the household); XXIV (the peace sealed by Athena)

The rational state is neither the arbitrary power of a master nor the absence of authority: Hegel defends a constitutional monarchy articulated into powers, corporations and estates (Stände), where authority holds by its rationality and not by force alone. Order is necessary, but an order in which rational law prevails.

Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §273-320 (the constitution)

To found or reform a state one must be alone, wielding a near-absolute authority; but to endure demands the opposite, a mixed government and laws set above men. Machiavelli holds coercive order to be necessary, against all anarchy, while lodging lasting liberty in Roman constitutionalism.

Discourses on Livy, I.9 (the sole founder) · Discourses on Livy, I.2 (mixed government)

In the Crito, though unjustly condemned, Socrates refuses to escape: having lived his whole life under Athens' laws and accepted their benefits, he owes them obedience, and to disobey them in order to save himself would be to commit an injustice in turn and to ruin the city. Yet this deference has a firm limit: he will obey the god rather than the judges if they order him to stop philosophizing, and he has already refused an iniquitous order, that to arrest Leon of Salamis.

Plato, Crito, 50a-54d (the speech of the Laws) · Plato, Apology, 29d, 32c-d (obeying the god; the refusal to arrest Leon)

Marcus praises in his adoptive father Antoninus a measured power, respectful of the laws and of the freedom of the governed, and forms the idea of a state administered by equality and freedom of speech. Holder of supreme authority, he conceives its exercise as a regulated service rather than a domination, which inclines him toward a constitutionalism that tempers authority by law.

Meditations, I, 14 · Meditations, I, 16 · Meditations, VI, 30

Against divine-right absolutism, the Enlightenment advocates not the absence of power but its limitation by law. Montesquieu supplies the mechanism: for « power to check power », the legislative, executive and judicial must be separated and balanced. Liberty is not release from all authority but the security afforded by good laws. The century is nonetheless crossed by a tension: from Voltaire to Diderot, several philosophes also look to the reforms of an enlightened despot, not always with a constitutional guarantee.

Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, book XI · Voltaire, Philosophical Letters

If institutions, magistracies and civic honours are only nomos, then no established authority holds a natural title to command: Diogenes despises the powerful, mocks the assemblies, and recognises order in nature alone. The distrust comes with no political project to replace what it rejects: by analogy one may read in it an anarchism of the self-sufficient individual rather than a doctrine of the city, and the position stays inferred from anecdotes more than asserted as a thesis. His lamp in broad daylight, searching for a man, is aimed first at the figures of power and reputation.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 41

The Cynic despises institutions, magistracies, and civic conventions, holding them to be arbitrary constructions with no natural worth. This distrust of any established order, with no political project to replace it, tends toward a form of anarchism of the self-sufficient individual: Diogenes searched in broad daylight, lamp in hand, for a true human being among the figures of power.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 41

Sartre, an engaged and dissenting intellectual, refuses the constituted authorities that fix man in a role or deny his freedom: he declines the Nobel Prize in 1964 so as not to be institutionalized, supports anti-colonial struggles and the revolt of 1968. Without theorizing a systematic anarchism, his constant distrust of the state, of institutions and of all alienating authority leans clearly toward that pole.

Refusal of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1964); political commitments (anti-colonialism, May 1968)

The good Taoist ruler is the one who governs least: he practices wu wei 無為 (non-action) in politics, lightens laws and constraints, and lets the people follow their ziran 自然 (natural bent). Multiplying prohibitions and regulations only increases disorder, hence a libertarian leaning close to anarchism.

Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 57, 60 · Zhuangzi, ch. 11 (Letting Be and Exercising Forbearance)

Beauvoir distrusts authorities that fix individuals in imposed roles (patriarchy, traditions, dogmas) and treats unquestioned obedience as a form of bad faith. Without advocating the abolition of all institutions, she makes a power's legitimacy depend on whether it widens each person's concrete freedom, hence a marked wariness toward authority.

The Second Sex (1949), critique of patriarchal authority · The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), the "serious man" and submission to established values

The state is conceived as an instrument of class domination, a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie; after the transitional dictatorship of the proletariat, the state is meant to wither away in the classless society. The horizon is thus the extinction of coercive power, leaning toward the anarchist pole, without joining the anarchism that would abolish the state with no transitional phase.

Manifesto of the Communist Party, ch. 1 (the state as committee of the bourgeoisie) · Critique of the Gotha Programme (withering away of the state)

In the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza argues that the end of the state is freedom and defends freedom of thought and expression as a condition of civil peace and the growth of knowledge. Without being an anarchist, he sharply limits authority, religious authority above all, in the name of that freedom.

Theological-Political Treatise, ch. 20 (the freedom to philosophize)