Authors: Duhamel & Mény
Summary: In about 600 words, the entry broadly defines authority as the capacity to obtain obedience and respect.
After a brief digression on the usage of the term in the French constitution, the author recognizes the real difficulty to deal with this concept since it belongs to contrasting semantic fields. This difficulty is accrued, it is argued, by the literary usage of the term as a synonym for independent government agency.
The entry identifies two dimensions of the concept: a symbolic and an institutional one. The former stems from the ethimology, i.e. auctoritas, which means prestige and is opposed to potestas, which means legal power. The latter was highlighted by Talcott Parsons' analysis on Weber's work. Indeed, according to Parsons the different forms of authority identified by Weber (traditional, charismatic, bureaucratic) correspond to different types of societies and are closely associated with the way authority was institutionalized.
The entry closes noticing the ambiguity implied by the term, i.e. whether authority depends more on a desire of servitude from below rather than on a will of domination from above.