Nature and Functions of Authority

THIS paper intends to set forth the present state of an investigation which is still far from being complete, although it was started many years ago. In order to characterize the purpose and the spirit of this research, I should like to specify the problems which stimulated it. These problems arise from commonplace observations. Radical anarchists excepted, no social thinker ever questioned the fact that social happiness is based upon a felicitous combination of authority and liberty....
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THIS paper intends to set forth the present state of an investigation which is still far from being complete, although it was started many years ago. In order to characterize the purpose and the spirit of this research, I should like to specify the problems which stimulated it. These problems arise from commonplace observations. Radical anarchists excepted, no social thinker ever questioned the fact that social happiness is based upon a felicitous combination of authority and liberty. However vague and ill-defined our concepts of authority and liberty may be, we realize at once that authority and liberty are at the same time antinomic and complementary terms. By saying that they are antinomic terms, I do not mean that their antinomic character is absolute and unqualified. I mean only that, in a certain sense and to some extent, those terms are undeniably opposed to one another. As to their complementary character, it is quite clear that authority, when it is not fairly balanced by liberty, is but tyranny, and that liberty, when it is not fairly balanced by authority, is but abusive license. Each of these terms destroys itself at the very moment when it destroys the other term by its excess. Therefore, both unrestricted liberty and boundless authority are fictitious conceptions, each of which implies its own negation together with the annihilation of society. There would be hardly any exaggeration in the statement that the essential question, for every social group, is that of combining rightly the forces of authority and liberty.In the practical solution of such a question, the social virtues of the responsible persons play the decisive role. Whatever the considered community, small or large, familial, economic or political, its happiness depends on the ability of its head to determine exactly the right limits of his authority, together with the ability of those who must obey to recognize that their claim for freedom cannot reasonably exceed certain limits. Inquiring into the nature of this ability to delineate the boundaries of one's field of action, let us say that it consists in a particular form of the virtue of prudence, in a wisdom which is practical in the full sense of the term, and proceeds from the virtuous dispositions of the will, justice, moderation, and charity.