Auctoritas
Auctoritas is the
latin word that originated "
authority". According to
Benveniste, it comes from the verb
augeo ("to augment"): the
auctor is
is qui auget, the one who augments the act â€" or the juridical situation â€" of another. The English word "
Author" also derives from
auctoritas and
augeo.
Auctoritas is used in
Roman law to design the
Senate's authority, as opposed to
potestas ("power") or
imperium, which is detained by the
magistrates or the
people. In the private domain,
auctoritas is the
auctor's characteristic: the
pater familias "authorizes", that is validates and legitimates, his son's wedding
in prostate.
Auctoritas is a juridical power to validate, legitimate another act: in itself, it has no sense, as it has to be related to this other act. In other words, law (more generally, right) doubles and recovers life in a
dialectic relationship.
Philosopher
Giorgio Agamben has demonstrated the relationship between the Roman
auctoritas,
Max Weber's "
charismatic power" and
Carl Schmitt's tentative to produce groundwork for the
national-socialist FĂĽhrertum doctrine.
Sovereignty was first defined by the pseudo-
Archytas, he shows, as "living law" (
nomos empsuchon), which direct equivalent in the 20th century is doubtlessly the
FĂĽhrerprinzip: the
FĂĽhrer is "living law", according to this theory of sovereignty â€" which may explain â€" Agamben doesn't directly refers to that, but it can be deduced from his work â€" why no written order of the "
Final Solution" have been found, apart from the 1942
Wannsee Conference. As "living law", the
FĂĽhrer is distinguished from
gramma, or written law, as
auctoritas differs from the
magistrates' observance of written law. The
FĂĽhrer has no use whatsoever of "written law", as he is â€" in Nazi theory â€" himself the
incarnation of law.
According to Giorgio Agamben ,
"Auctoritas and
potestas are clearly distinct - although they form together a
binary system" . Agamben quotes
Mommsen, who explains that
auctoritas is "less than an
order and more than an advice" .
Auctoritas, "charism" and FĂĽhrertum doctrine
While
potestas derives from the social function,
auctoritas "immediately derives from the
patres personal condition". As such, it is akin to Max Weber's concept of charism. According to Agamben, this is why, when the king died, the tradition demanded to create a wax-double of the
sovereign in the
funus imaginarium, as did
Ernst Kantorowicz demonstrate in
The King's Two Bodies (1957): in the person detaining
auctoritas â€" the sovereign â€"
public life and
private life have become inseparable.
Augustus, the first Roman emperor who claimed
auctoritas as the basis of
princeps status in a famous passage of
Res Gestae, had opened up his house to public eyes. It is thus necessary to distinguish two bodies of the sovereign in order to assure
dignitas (term used by Kantorowicz, here a synonym of
auctoritas) continuity.
The concept of
auctoritas played a key-role in
fascism and
nazism, in particular concerning
Carl Schmitt's theories, argues Agamben:
"To understand modern phenomenons such as the fascist
Duce or the nazi
FĂĽhrer, it is important not to forget their continuity with the principe of
auctoritas principis {Agamben refers here to Augustus's
Res Gestae}. {…} Neither does the
Duce nor the
FĂĽhrer represent constitutionnally defined public charges â€" even though Mussolini and Hitler endorsed respectively the charge of head of government and Reich's chancellor, just as Augustus endorsed the
imperium consulare or the
potestas tribunicia. The
Duce 's or the
FĂĽhrers qualities are immediately related to the physical person and belong to the biopolitical tradition of auctoritas
and not to the juridical tradition of potestas
"
Thus, Agamben opposes Foucault's concept of "biopolitics" to right (law), as he defines the state of exception, in Homo sacer, as the inclusion of life by right under the figure of exception, which is simultaneously inclusion and exclusion. Following Walter Benjamin's lead, he explains that our task would be to radically differentiate "pure violence" from right, instead of tying them together, as did Carl Schmitt.
Agamben concludes his chapter on "Auctoritas and
potestas" writing:
"It is significative that modern specialists were so enclined to admit that
auctoritas was inherent to the living person of the
pater or the
princeps. What was evidently an
ideology or a
fictio aiming to be the groundwork of
auctoritas preeminence or, at least, specific rank compared to potestas
thus became a figure of right's {law â€" "droit"} immanence to life. (...) Although it is evident that there can't be an eternal human type that would incarnate each time in Augustus, Napoleon, Hitler, but only more or less comparable ("semblables") mechanisms {"dispositif", a term often used by Foucault} â€" the state of exception, the justitium, the auctoritas principis
, the FĂĽhrertum
â€", put in use in more or less differents circumstances, in the 1930s â€" overall, but not only â€" in Germany, the power that Weber had defined as "charismatic" is related to the concept of auctoritas
and elaborated in a FĂĽhrertum
doctrine as the original and personal power of a leader. In 1933, in a short article intending to define the fundamental concepts of national-socialism, Schmitt defines the FĂĽhrung
principe by the "root identity between the leader and his entourage" {"identité de souche entre le chef et son entourage''"} (we shall note the use of weberian concepts)."
Interregnum, justitium and nomos empsuchos (the sovereign as "living law")
In the chapter preceding
Auctoritas and potestas, Agamben advances an explanation of the transformation of
justitium, a technical term referring to the
state of exception, declared to cope with
tumultus state (rebellion, uprising, riots…), at the end of the
Roman Republic, into a term simply referring to the mourning of the sovereign's death during
interregnum periods:
"The correspondence between
justitutium and mourning here shows its true signification. If the sovereign is a living
nomos, if then
anomie and
nomos coĂŻncide in his person without any left-over, then anarchy (which, at his death, when the link attaching him to law his broken, threatens to unleash itself in the city) must be ritualized and controlled, by the transformation of state of exception in public mourning and of mourning in
justitium (…) Before acquiring the modern form of a decision on emergency {Schmitt's definition}, relationship between sovereignty and state of exception present itself under the form of an identity between the sovereign and anomie. As living law, the sovereign is deeply
anomos. Here also the state of exception is the life â€" more secret and true â€" of law."
The first formulation of the thesis according to which "the sovereign is a living law" found its first formulation on the treaty "On law and justice" by pseudo-
Archytas, conserved by Stobée with Diotogène's treaty on sovereignty. It is the first attempt to conceive a form of sovereignty completely enfranchised from laws, being itself the source of
legitimacy. This theory must be radically distinguished from
natural rights theory or
Antigone's appeal to the "eternal and unwritten laws" to which even monarchs must abide, as it is a theory of sovereignty (in fact, it is quite the reverse of Antigone's rebellion).
Pseudo-Archytas distinguished the sovereign (
basileus), who is the law, from the
magistrate (
archĹŤn), who limits himself to observing the law. "Identification between law and sovereign has as consequence, writes Agamben, the scission of law into a "living" law (
nomos empsuchos), hierarchically superior, and a written law (
gramma), which is subordinate to the first one". He then quotes A. Delatte's
Essais sur la politique pythagoricienne (Paris, 1922), himself quoting the pseudo-Archytas:
"I say that all communities are composed of an
archĹŤn (the magistrate who commands), a commanded one, and, as tierce party, laws. Among those ones, the living one is the sovereign (
ho men empsuchos ho basileus), and the inanimate one is the letter (
gramma). Law is the first element, the king is legal, the magistrate accorded to law, the commanded free and all of the city happy; but, in case of corruption ("dévoiement"), the sovereign is a
tyrant, the magistrate is not accorded to law and the community is unhappy."
*
AuthoritarianismFĂĽhrerprinzip*
Roman law*
Giorgio AgambenDignitas* Giorgio Agamben,
State of Exception (2005)
* Theodor Mommsen,
Römisches Staatsrecht ("Roman Constitutional Law", volume III) (Graz, 1969)
* Agamben,
State of Exception (
ibid.), chapter 6
"Auctoritas and
potestas", § 7.
* Agamben,
ibid., chapter 6, § 8.
* Agamben,
ibid., chapter 5, § 3.
*
Giorgio Agamben,
State of Exception (2005) and
Homo sacer*
Hannah Arendt,
Between Past and Future (New York, Viking, 1961) "The Concept of Authority"
