The Notion of Authority (A Brief Presentation)

Table of contents :
Title Page......Page 2
Copyright......Page 3
Contents......Page 4
Translator’s Note......Page 5
Preliminary Remarks......Page 30
I. Phenomenological Analysis......Page 34
II. Metaphysical Analysis......Page 71
III. Ontological Analysis......Page 79
B. Deductions......Page 82
I. Political Applications......Page 83
II. Ethical Applications......Page 110
III. Psychological Applications......Page 112
1. An Analysis of the Marshal’s Authority......Page 115
2. Remarks on the Révolution Nationale......Page 121

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This English-language edition first published by Verso 2014 Translation © Hager Weslati 2014

First published as La notion de l’autorité © Éditions Gallimard 2004 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-095-7 (HBK) eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-630-0 (US)

eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-631-7 (UK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Kojève, Alexandre, 1902-1968. [Notion de l’autorité. English]

The notion of authority : (a brief presentation) / Alexandre Kojève; edited and introduced by François Terré; translated by Hager Weslati. pages cm

ISBN 978-1-78168-095-7 (alk. paper)

1. Authority. 2. Law–Philosophy. I. Title. BD209.K6513 2014 303.3’6--dc23 2013047896

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. v3.1

Contents Cover

Title Page Copyright

Translator’s Note

Introduction to the French Edition by François Terré PRELIMINARY REMARKS A. Analyses I. Phenomenological Analysis II. Metaphysical Analysis III. Ontological Analysis B. Deductions I. Political Applications II. Ethical Applications III. Psychological Applications APPENDICES

1. An Analysis of the Marshal’s Authority 2. Remarks on the Révolution Nationale

Translator’s Note

The French edition of The Notion of Authority, a work that was never made public in the author’s lifetime, reproduces a note from the manuscript written at the bottom of the table of contents, omitted here in the English translation. The note reads, ‘N.B. Key issues are discussed in A, I and A, II. See also B, I.’ Strange as it sounds, this line of advice opens a window onto the author’s intentions. Firstly, The Notion of Authority was not intended for public consumption. It reads like a memorandum to an addressee involved in the practical running of government. The Notion can, therefore, be read as a policy paper. Since the ‘man of action’ (a tyrant) is always in a hurry, it is important that the philosopher’s counsel to the politician is precise and concise (see ‘L’action politique des philosophes’ in Critique, n. 41, 1950, pp. 46– and n. 42, pp. 138–55). In Kojève’s lifetime, it is very likely that the manuscript of The Notion was shared with his acquaintances in the French government or read by some of his intellectual interlocutors. A letter dated 9 July 1942 from Henri Moysset (senior minister in the Vichy government but also close friends of Eric Weil’s family) acknowledges receipt of The Notion. It is also known for instance that Kojève dispatched a voluminous Russian manuscript to ‘Stalin and the Russian people’ in 1941 via the Soviet embassy in Paris, and that in 1945 he prepared a memorandum to Jean Filippi on French foreign policy, a version of which is best known as ‘The Latin Empire’. Secondly, the note alerting the reader to what is interesting in the ‘book’ may also be interpreted from a philosophical angle. Since The Notion focuses on the phenomenological analysis of authority, it is nothing other than a fragment from a bigger project. Kojève’s philosophical system consists of three planes: phenomenology, energology, and ontology. He is alerting readers that his study is not conclusive, because it does not cover all three planes of his system.

Kojève’s stylistic idiosyncrasies, namely his use of capitals and italics, have been kept as found in the original French manuscript. All previous editors of Kojève’s published work, Raymond Queneau or Raymond Aron for Gallimard, Georges Bataille or Éric Weil in Critique, as well as his North American translators; they all have respected Kojève’s stylistic oddities. We saw no reason to deviate from that established tradition in the present translation. It is very likely that the use of capitals, in particular, has something to do with Kojève’s philosophical education in German universities in the mid-1920s. It is, however, quite clear that capitalized words such as ‘Authority’ or ‘State’ refer to concepts rather than to abstract words or floating signifiers with changing meanings and usage. Words like ‘Leader’, ‘Father’, ‘Judge’ or ‘Master’, do not refer to actual persons in the flesh, but to phenomenological, ontological and ‘metaphysical’ notions, whose meaning can only be deduced from Kojève’s philosophical system (Système du savoir). More generally, I have supplied editorial notes throughout both the introduction and main text. These notes are enclosed in square brackets to indicate their provenance.

Introduction to the French Edition François Terré Alexandre Kojève exerted a major influence on philosophical thought, and his is a fascinating career. Originally from Russia, born in 1902, he left the land of the Soviets in 1919 or 1920 for the Berlin of Brecht and expressionism. In 1926, as things started taking a turn for the worse in the Weimar Republic, he settled in the Paris of the roaring twenties. The 1929 economic crisis, coming on top of previous bad investments, left him bankrupt. He decided to take up philosophy for a living. In the meantime, he had studied ‘the ultimate ends of the ethics of Christianity and Buddhism’ and published in 1931 an essay on ‘atheism’.1 The lure of oriental philosophies led him to learn Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan. He defended his dissertation on Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900) at Heidelberg in 1926. Strains on his financial means, and a good word from his friend Alexandre Koyré, whom he later succeeded in his teaching post, led to Kojève finding himself running a seminar at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. Last but not least of the many philosopher– educators before him, he undertook a paragraph-by-paragraph commentary on The Phenomenology of Spirit. While access to the seminar was initially limited, it subsequently attracted a number of fascinated listeners as diverse as the directions their respective careers would later take: Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Éric Weil, Robert Marjolin, Gaston Fessard, Raymond Aron, Raymond Polin, Pierre Klossowski, Maurice Merleau-Ponty … even Raymond Queneau. It was under the aegis of the latter that Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, a text based on lecture notes taken during Kojève’s seminar,2 was published in 1948. Kojève’s teaching was an ongoing flirtation with spectacle and play. In Raymond Aron’s Memoirs, Kojève’s ‘talent’ and ‘dialectical virtuosity’ are explicitly acknowledged, but ‘there still remains a question that [Aron] cannot evade. When [Kojève] described himself as a “strictly observant

Stalinist” in 1938 or 1939, was he serious, or more precisely, in which sense was he serious?’3 Aron, however, insists right away that in private conversation Kojève did not deny the fact that Russia was governed by brutes. ‘I’m still wondering’, adds Raymond Aron, ‘which side of Kojève was mere intellectual or existential play.’4 Kojève’s thought was a decisive stage in the return to Hegel which, since 1945, marked ‘most of the protagonists of the three-H generation named after Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger’. This was paralleled, in the same vein of ‘the humanisation of nothingness’, by a ‘revolt against neoKantianism’ and the ‘eclipse of Bergsonism’.5 It matters little that subsequently we have witnessed the ebb and flow of this line of thought. This sequence still shows the extent to which Hegel’s thought remained an obligatory route even for those who sought to shield themselves from it. In this respect, whether faithful to Hegel or not – but what does such faithfulness mean? – Kojève’s influence was capital in terms of the expansion of the realm of reason. This is excellently formulated by Vincent Descombes in the following terms: any thinking which aspires to be dialectical must, by definition, induce in reason a movement towards what is entirely foreign to it, towards the other. The whole issue now rests upon whether the other has been returned to the same in the course of this movement, or whether (so as to embrace rational and irrational, the same and the other at once) reason will have to transform itself, losing its initial identity, ceasing to be the same and becoming other with the other.6 Hence reason’s obligatory passage via excess or aberration on its path towards wisdom; and via cynicism, violence or terror where, according to Kojève, both the philosopher and the tyrant act similarly, or at times even together. From Hegel, Kojève borrows an immanent teleology that guides the dialectical movement of negativity, the very force of ideologies of progress;7 but its essential contribution rests on the idea that there comes a moment, with the contradictions of history ultimately resolved, when this teleology itself comes to an end. The end-of-history thesis is added to the famous Hegelian master–slave dialectic; the one and the other are knit together.

Hegel published The Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807, the year following Napoleon’s victory at Jena. Shaped by the turbulent history of his time, Hegel discerned a movement based on definitive achievements which, in the opinion of many, could trigger the perpetual movement of a system capable of verifying its own totality. Hegel’s 1821 Principles of the Philosophy of Right was his last philosophical work published before his death. When, 122 years later, Kojève finished his Esquisse d’une phénoménologie du droit, this was in the midst of the Second World War. No sooner had he been naturalized as a French citizen than he was called up to take part in the ‘phony war’, but in 1940, like many others, he lost his regiment. In 1941 he settled in the so-called zone libre, where Nina Ivanoff8 managed to reach him, even though she did not have a French passport. They lived in Marseille, where they were joined by Léon Poliakov, a Jew of Russian origin, childhood friend of Nina Ivanoff, and organiser of resistance movements in coordination with the clandestine resistance group led by Jean Cassou.9 Kojève participated actively in the Resistance. He had long known what the risk of death meant in theory, and when one day this risk materialised, the wellunderstood and well-practiced master–slave dialectic helped save lives.10 When Kojève went to visit Éric Weil’s family in Gramat, a small village in Lot, in the Midi Pyrenees region of France, he settled in a small hotel with Nina Ivanoff during the summer of 1943. There he wrote his Esquisse d’une phénoménologie du droit, which would be published posthumously, thirteen years after his death.11 Received with immense interest by many legal scholars and philosophers, the Esquisse is an essential contribution to contemporary philosophy precisely in so far as it is an informed treatment of the question of right. Overcoming the enigma that has long been inherent in the definition of right, Kojève undoubtedly brought to this subject a groundbreaking perspective, recontextualising and then surpassing both the exclusive focus on values and the contemplation of a formal construction claiming that its origin, nature, and justification are to be found nowhere outside itself. More than twenty years after its publication, the Esquisse has remained intact in the face of the excesses of analytic philosophy, probably in part because it assumes and transcends the ambivalence of right in its relations with practical facts. It also identifies a circular movement – from the real to the rational and from the rational to the real – inherent

in the very essence of right. Kojève questioned the definition of right, and how it is to be grasped, identified, and recognised – most vexing questions whose ambiguities have been noted by legal scholars for centuries. According to Kojève, the juridical phenomenon necessarily implies, during the interaction between two human beings, the intervention of an impartial and disinterested third party. This third party is, in its diverse functions, legislator, judge, or law officer; but it is mainly in so far as the third party intervenes as judge that the juridical, as such, is revealed. Moreover, this third party necessarily exists because there is in Man a desire to realise justice and even a pleasure in pronouncing judgements as particular as sexual or aesthetic pleasure. There is a specifically juridical interest proper to Man, and inspired by the idea of justice. According to Kojève, as for Hegel, work presupposes the idea of the other, since economic man is always coupled with a conceited man who aspires to recognition, the very condition of self-consciousness – starting with the consciousness of pronouncing a judgement and proceeding to the consciousness of being judged. From this there follow essential distinctions between the juridical, on the one hand, and the religious, moral, economic, and political, on the other. In other words, if it is still the development of the idea that lies at the heart of Kojève’s philosophy of right, it is henceforth the idea of justice that is at stake and no longer the Hegelian idea of freedom. The question of authority is not overlooked in the Esquisse. Evidently, Kojève looks at the question of authority in the context of his analysis of ‘Right in the familial society’. A footnote on page 411 reads: ‘See my “Brief Article on Authority” (which needs to be completed in its application to the familial sphere) (In the State, the Authority of the Master seems to prevail above all in foreign policy, in relations with the Enemy; that of the Leader in domestic policy, in relations among Friends).’12 The body of the text contains an important passage marking the link in Kojève’s thought between the phenomenology of right and Authority, or more precisely with regard to its diverse types: ‘It is still the Authority of being and not action to which one will have to resort in the Family’. Kojève then adds: Now, the Authority of being is the Authority of the ‘Father’ type:

the Authority of the cause, of the author, of the origin and the source of what is; the Authority of the past which maintains itself in the present by the sole fact of the ontological ‘inertia’ of being. In the political sphere, it is the Authority of action (of the present) and consequently of the project (of the future), i.e. the Authority of the ‘Master’ and ‘Leader’ type, that is primary. In the familial sphere, by contrast, the first Authority, the grounding Authority, is of the ‘Father’ type (of the past). The Authorities of Judge (of ‘eternity,’ i.e. of impartiality), of Leader (who foresees and guides), and of Master (who decides and acts) are derived from that of the Father (who generates being and assures the perpetuity of the past identical with itself). In the State, on the contrary, it is the Authority of the Father (and of the Judge) that is derived from those of Master and Leader (that of the Master being primary). One therefore sees here again an essential difference between the Family and the State. On the one hand, the Kinsmen are not Friends opposed to a common Enemy. On the other hand, they are not the Governed who recognise the Authority of the Master and the Leader of the Governors. They are kinsmen who love another according to their degree of kinship, who therefore love above all their common kin, their ancestors, the source and origin of the being to which they attribute a positive value. And if they recognise an Authority (which gives them an appearance of political unity, but in fact only a familial unity), it is the Authority F, of that ‘kinsman’ par excellence, that they recognise, and it is this Authority F of being as such who is recognised also by non-kindred members of the Family: by slaves, servants, and so on, and – if the case arises – by other Families. Familial organisation of the Family is therefore something entirely different from the political organisation of the State: the kinsmen subordinate themselves to kinsmen (by love or authority) according to the kinship that determines their being, but they are not properly speaking governed by them.13 These passages corroborate the thesis that ‘the brief article on authority’ was written before the Esquisse, even if it mentions in passing another ‘article on right’ and even a ‘special article on the state’.14 While the first typed page of the manuscript that was subsequently published as the

Esquisse d’une phénoménologie du droit is signed and dated ‘Marseille, 1943’, the last page of the Notion de l’Autorité is signed at the end as follows: ‘A. Kojevnikoff, Marseille, 16/V 42’. Five months separate this date from the Allied invasion of French North Africa (9 November 1942) and the occupation of the zone libre by the German army. It was not until early in 1943 that von Paulus capitulated at Stalingrad, and, even closer, there was Pierre Laval’s famous speech of 22 June 1942 in which he declared that he ‘hoped for a German victory because without it, tomorrow Bolshevism will be everywhere’. The publication of Kojève’s study of the ‘notion of authority’ had to wait even longer than that of the Esquisse. Dominique Auffret refers to the manuscript, noting that ‘it has not yet been located’. It remained in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale, later the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Thanks to the fortunate attention of Florence de Lussy, chief librarian at the department of manuscripts, and to the donation by Nina Ivanoff of Kojève’s unpublished writings, this manuscript has finally seen the light of day. It completes, in the areas of phenomenology, metaphysics, and ontology, Kojève’s already published work on right, politics, and philosophy. In the years after writing this text in 1942, Kojève played a major role in the construction of Europe, on the fringes of administrative hierarchies. The wealth of knowledge and experience he gained is best illustrated by his controversy with one of his preferred interlocutors, Leo Strauss. The latter had just published a commentary on one of Xenophon’s dialogues: Hiero the Tyrant. The 1954 French translation of the book included a substantial critical study by Kojève on ‘Tyranny and Wisdom’. This is a seminal text for those who wish to know how Kojève carried on his essential investigation, history being in his opinion a succession of political actions guided by philosophers, themselves assisted by ‘intellectual mediators’. Kojève titled his study The Notion of Authority. From the outset, he notes that ‘It is a curious fact that the problem and notion of Authority have been little studied’: Questions pertaining to the transfer of Authority and its genesis have been the main concern, while the actual essence of this phenomenon has rarely attracted any attention. However, it is obviously impossible to tackle political power or even the structure

of the State without knowing what Authority is as such. A study of the notion of Authority, albeit provisional, is therefore essential, and must precede any study of the question of the State. In relation to what he could not have overlooked in writing these lines, particularly the controversy between Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt on the subject of dictatorship and the state of exception,15 Kojève’s introductory observation deserves great attention, even though, between 1942 and the present publication, philosophical reflection has made significant progress on the subject of authority, as it did already in Kojève’s lifetime. Even ignoring studies that do not touch upon or even address the subject except in a peripheral aside, we cannot overlook other works in relation to which, anachronisms notwithstanding, Kojève’s findings are and will remain fundamental. Firstly, Kojève’s argument throws light on and supplements the achievements of sociological development.16 The latter acknowledges that the decline of traditional authority is partly linked with the retreat of old institutions such as guild, neighbourhood, parish, and the family – institutions that formerly acted as intermediaries between power and the masses.17 In the course of this development, the distinction between (social) authority and (political) power became more marked. Social authority reflects the attachment of conservatives, or even radicals, to intermediary bodies, while political authority is seen as the foundation of a model inherited from the French Revolution, and by implication from the Enlightenment, especially Rousseau, characteristically hostile to ‘partial associations’ existing within the state. Subsequent development, marked by the return of communities, will be distinguished by a certain divide focused on the place and role of authority in its relation to power in the works of Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, Simmel, and many others. The natural persistence of authority in large-scale industry was confirmed by Engels,18 while bureaucracy played an important role in Weber’s theory of authority. Whether perceived in terms of integrative triangular relations (states, groupings, individuals), or in the guise of a circular relation between domination and obedience, dominations and subordinations, and so on; authority is defined in relation to that which

it is not, i.e. as a negative. It is in this respect that Kojève’s argument is crucial. Later studies on the subject of authority, however, must not be overlooked, especially that of Hannah Arendt. In a study published in 1958, entitled ‘What is Authority?’, Arendt precisely went beyond reflections related to the definition and notion of authority as such.19 After noting ‘a more or less general, more or less dramatic breakdown of all traditional authorities’, Arendt moved on to underline the fact that this crisis has spread to such pre-political areas as child-rearing and education, where authority in the widest sense has always been accepted as a natural necessity, obviously required as much by natural needs, the helplessness of the child, as by political necessity, the continuity of an established civilisation which can be assured only if those who are newcomers by birth are guided through a preestablished world into which they are born as strangers.20 According to Arendt, Greco-Roman tradition, extended and relayed by Christianity, has transmitted a concept that rests on the combination of three components: tradition, religion, and authority. At the same time, its history has been marked during recent centuries by the disappearance of tradition and the loss of religion. More stable, and yet fatally undermined in its very foundations, authority is also destined to disappear, even though its disappearance is only that of a ‘very specific form which had been valid throughout the Western World over a long period of time’. It is for this reason that ‘practically as well as theoretically, we are no longer in a position to know what authority really is’. Arendt adds that ‘the answer to this question cannot possibly lie in a definition of the nature or essence of “authority in general”.’21 However, this is exactly where the rest of her argument unintentionally leads; and it is here that an expectation is revealed which is more or less conscious and to which Kojève’s argument now responds. What lies at the origin of this tradition in decline, which offers, after all, and despite its vicissitudes, an ideal type born from a lasting conjunction in which tradition, religion, and authority converge? The premonitory signs are to be found, once again, in Greek philosophy.

If authority necessarily goes hand-in-hand with the obedience that it always requires, it nevertheless does not exclude constraint or persuasion, which, when used, both render authority useless. In this particular strand of universal history, authority is something else. Plato saw this when he drew on the relations between the shepherd and his flock, the steersman and the passengers on a ship, or on the doctor– patient relationship. However, it is in Rome, in the sacred foundation of the city, the house and the home, that ‘the word and concept of authority’ are to be found.22 This return to Roman law constituted already, through the expansion it entailed, a valuable addition to previous studies by classicists, including those who did not believe it possible to ‘reduce the different juridical aspects of the notion of auctoritas to a unifying concept’.23 On the side of private law, it is by virtue of his auctoritas that the father or the guardian – auctor derived from augere (increase) – exerts his authority: ‘whether it authorises, or whether it ratifies, it supposes a foreign activity which it validates’.24 It is ‘an attribute related to the individual, and originally to the physical person … the privilege, the right, belonging to a Roman in prescribed conditions to serve as foundation for the juridical situation created by others’.25 In the context of Roman public law, at the time of the Law of the Twelve Tables, towards the middle of the fifth century BCE, the Roman people secured a role in the res publica and the making of law. For a long time, however, laws had to be ratified by the patrician senators in order to obtain the auctoritas patrum. Auctoritas subsequently became a preliminary senatorial agreement, before it developed into mere opinion, though laws were passed only rarely against the view of the Senate.26 This visible reduction promoted the rise of the notion of authority in line with its etymology, in such a way that an increase in the very foundation of religion and the city parallels the augmentation of the mystical and sacred foundation of authority! In a way, it is for this reason that it remains distinct from both imperium and potestas. As Mommsen explains, it is ‘less than an order and more than advice’.27 It is that which does not imply constraint in order to be heard or obeyed; on the contrary, it is the ‘force which confers legitimacy’,28 which ‘seems to act as a force that suspends potestas where it took place and reactivates it where it was no longer in force’.29 Its legacy would be revisited a long time later, when

Max Weber linked charismatic power to the concept of auctoritas and the Führerprinzip doctrine. Frequently, the author expresses the modesty of his ambitions, contenting himself here and there with tracing general outlines for further development. No less frequently does he use, in an enlightening manner, the infinite resources of punctuation, resorting to capital letters, parentheses, footnotes, consistently observed throughout the text, to present an outline of the notion of authority, both on the basis of and beyond the four irreducible theories proposed in the course of history – besides the theological theory, there are those of Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel. Kojève’s argument is organised in terms of analyses followed by their concrete application. The first and most important analysis, with which Kojève begins, is the phenomenological one – an approach that those who are familiar with his Outline of a Phenomenology of Right will not find surprising. From the outset, the author follows a holistic approach. As a social phenomenon, ‘Authority is the possibility that an agent has of acting on others (or on another), without these others reacting against him, despite being capable of doing so.’ ‘By acting with Authority, the agent can change the outward human given without suffering a repercussion from such action, i.e. without himself changing as a result of his action.’ Clarification: ‘If, in order to make someone get out of my room, I have to use force, I have to change my own behaviour to realize the act in question, and I show through this behaviour that I have no authority.’ A consequence of this is the isolation of the notion of authority, which ‘excludes force, [whereas] right implies and presupposes force while being something different from it.’ Necessarily ‘recognised’ by its subjects, ‘every human Authority that exists must have a ’cause’, a ‘reason’ or a ‘justification’ for its existence, a raison d’être’. In other terms, why is it consciously and willingly recognised, endured without reaction? What is this authority? The phenomenological approach consists in setting out facts and then indicating the result without providing any proof, properly speaking, to demonstrate them. This leads Kojève to distinguish four types that are ‘simple, pure or elementary’: authority of the father over the child, of the

master over the slave, of the leader over the gang, and of the judge over the person or persons he judges. Various kinds of authority are subsequently linked to the four pure ones. For example: to the authority of the father, that of tradition; to the authority of the master, that of the nobility; to the authority of the leader, that of the boss; to the authority of the judge, that of the confessor, and so on. This shows that there can exist mixed authorities that can pertain to several types. Coming back to the four philosophies mentioned above, Kojève notes their correspondence to four pure types of authority. That of the master is in line with Hegel’s thought and with the relation between master and slave, which is, apparently, considered a ‘general theory of authority’, even though it does not account for the authority of the father, leader, or judge types. Following Aristotle, another type of authority becomes central – that of the leader who is more apt than others to foresee, who is more intelligent and intuitive; the leader is he who conceives of a project and who guides and commands. Platonic thought is again different, every authority being founded, or needing to be founded, on justice or equity. In this respect, it is the authority of the judge that is central and exclusive. Thus, it is ‘the claim to impartiality, objectivity, disinterestedness, and so on, that always gives rise to an authority’. Similarly, the ‘ “just” or “honest” man possesses an unquestionable authority, even if he does not hold the position of an arbiter’. The scholastic or theocratic theory, itself having a universal and exclusive dimension, corresponds to the authority of the father, which is in reality, like the three other types of authority, endowed with a divine essence because its authority is derived from God via the transmission of hereditary essence. ‘God the Father’, ‘our Father which art in heaven’ considered as ‘creator of man and the world’, ‘ “Father of men” because he has effectively “engendered” them by “creating” them (ex nihilo).’ Despite the fact that each of these philosophical theories aspires to exclusivity, none of them manages, according to Kojève, to account for the four pure types of authority. This line of analysis leads him to take for granted the plural aspect of authority. Consequently, all controversies ensuing from the dominating tendencies are repressed. And it should not be forgotten that the retained typology, reminiscent of Weber’s theory of ideal types, does not exclude in any way the possibility of multiple combinations – each simply marked by the

predominance of one of them. Kojève even drafts a comprehensive list of all the possible types of authority, refining once again the phenomenological approach by distinguishing ‘the total authority, which encompasses all four pure types’ from ‘selective authorities, which integrate only one, two or three of these types’, every concrete authority being ‘in fact, more or less total.’ ‘Obviously, absolute authority in the strong sense of the word is never realized in fact. Only God is held to possess it (or more precisely, God should have possessed it)’ [p. 31]. The attention paid to the authority of the father, as well as to its other forms, makes it possible to comprehend certain dislocations that are apprehended, especially nowadays, in terms of decline. Going beyond certain recurrent grievances about family or education, it allows for a better grasp of what is really in question, this concealed or repressed authority of the father. The debated contribution of psychoanalysis, however, is outside the present field of discussion. Conversely, the rediscovery of the place of authority in family or para-family relations, requiring a dépassement of the reductionist distinction between public and private law, cannot be overlooked. In Rome, the term auctoritas designated the formal guarantee given by the guardian to the acts of his ward. As such, it is distinguished from validity, and even more from effectiveness. It is something other than the manifestation of power. The evolution of legislative expressions consolidates the persistence or return of a notion subject to eclipse in certain cases. Thus, the expression of paternal power, long dominant in characterising the power of parents over their children, and inherited – in both content and spirit – from the Napoleonic codification, was replaced by parental authority. This substitution, enacted by the law of 4 June 1870, corresponded to profound changes in family relations. But we can only grasp it properly when we refer to the symbolic value and meaning of the notion of authority as understood by Kojève. Whichever authority we are talking about, its genesis is spontaneous, including that of the father who, in order to be endowed with authority, still has to ‘become a father (or, in the derivative case, reach a more or less advanced age)’. This means that there is no conditioned authority that comes into being ‘as a result of acts other than those of he who will maintain it’. This is why Kojève distances himself from Rousseau and social contract theory, since in this context the authority that comes

from the contract is ‘conditioned by something other than itself’ – by the preliminary existence of another authority. Phenomenological analysis excludes the possibility of the coming into being of authority by the effect of a social contract and an ‘erroneous interpretation of the existence of (political or other) elections’, which cannot result in the generation of an authority that does not already exist. Neither the majority nor the minority can invoke an original, pure, and sui generis authority. More fundamentally, the pretentions to a total and absolute authority of the whole over the parts, of the majority over the minority, only took shape artificially from the moment when the general will ‘ceased to have a divine character (or even an “ideological” one, interpreted by “spiritual” leaders)’, and the idea was conceived that the ‘ “general will” is expressed through the will of the Majority’. Thus Kojève does not attribute any original place to social contract theory in relation to the genesis of authority. And it becomes impossible to disregard his analysis in political science and political philosophy. It is the same with his analyses of the transmission of authority, whether this takes place by way of heredity, election, or nomination. The term ‘transmission’ expresses the idea that authority exists – the same and in itself – without being linked to a determinate person. If it is realised by heredity, a correlation with the authority of the father is the most adequate – as is the case with the authority of tradition. The other two forms of transmission, similar as they are, are nevertheless distinct: there is transmission of Authority by nomination when the candidate for Authority is designated by the person (or persons) who already possess an Authority, and one of the same type (a Leader nominated by a Leader, for example); there is transmission by election when the candidate is designated by a person or persons who either have no Authority or have an Authority of another type (a Judge nominated by a Leader, for example).’ [this page] This last analysis even leads the author to claim that, since the elector does not have a proper authority and his choice does not have any value for others, therefore, ‘strictly speaking, election does not differ in essence from the drawing of lots’. In fact, ‘The random choice of jurors is a kind of spontaneous genesis of the authority of the judge’. As Kojève notes,

the consequence of this would require, in phenomenological terms, a number of supplementary analyses. Kojève certainly does not intend to limit himself to this field of investigation. In this respect, he adopts an attitude similar to that which he followed in the Esquisse. Already there, he mentioned the need to divide all human phenomena into juridical and nonjuridical ones in order to find a satisfying definition – that is, applicable to all the phenomena in question and to them only. And it would still be necessary to complete the phenomenological description by an analysis of the metaphysical (cosmological) and ontological substructure of the phenomenon being described in order to ward off the risk of the advent in the future of a new case, forcing the revision of the definition that was conforming to the cases realised in the present and the past … It should be understood that I have not even tried to reach this ideal in the pages that are going to follow … I have deliberately avoided a metaphysical or ontological analysis.30 Kojève adopts a different approach with regard to the notion of authority, since he follows phenomenology with metaphysics and ontology, though not without emphasising the very cursory character of his reflections. These two further developments indicate what a similar investigation of the question of right and its essence would have been, if he had had the time for this. As for authority, we see clearly that phenomenology, despite nourishing philosophical reflection, nevertheless leaves the mind eager for more in-depth knowledge and comprehension. The existence of four pure types corresponding to four philosophical theories does not excuse us from looking into what they have in common, what corresponds to the use of the same term. This search manifests a centripetal movement of thought. Reflection then continues on its path towards metaphysics from a conception of authority that is necessarily social and historical, implied by the possibility of a reaction, in relation to a society, or even better, in relation to a state, that may be religious or political, and so on. The author, adhering to this latter form, thinks that the foundation of

authority pertains to a ‘modification of the [human or historical] entity “time” ’. As distinct from natural times that correspond to the primacy of the (physical) present or the (biological) past, the time of authority is linked to the primacy of the future so much so that ‘authority par excellence is that of the … “revolutionary” leader (whether driven by political, religious or other motives) with a universal “project”.’ But the fact remains that undoubtedly ‘time has, as such, the value of an authority … in all of its three modes.’ The primacy of the (‘venerable’) past speaks for itself. Arendt has argued this point in terms of foundation and tradition. The passing of time, which, added to the belief and imagination of men, founds the compulsory character of customs, is also a basis of the legitimacy both of a people and of monarchs. From this common foundation may result disputes over frontiers or identity that are subsequently overcome in the further course of events. There is in fact also for Kojève an authority of the future, that of ‘tomorrow’s man’, that of the ‘young’. As for the authority of the present, it is lived on a daily basis, as with ‘fashion’ for instance, or more generally, with the ‘ “real presence” of something in the world … as opposed to the “poetic” unreality of the past and the “utopian” unreality of the future’. What is revealed here is the primary importance of metaphysical analysis and the taking into account of temporality. ‘[A]ll these “temporal” Authorities are set against the Authority of eternity … the negation of Time’ – that is to say, one of its modes of time. The key question that presents itself at that point is whether the Authority of eternity is a ‘sui generis Authority’ or a direct ‘manifestation’ of the metaphysical bases of the four ‘pure’ types of Authority’ [pp. 49–50]. Kojève believes that this second analysis is correct, which leads to a fundamental conclusion asserting the primacy of eternity. The latter is authoritarian only in and through its relations with time: ‘[B]eing the negation of the particular modes of Time, [it] can be considered as the totality or the integration of the latter’ [this page]. Now, this integration leads to ‘the idea of seeing the authority of the judge as closer to the eternal’. At the same time, the place of the judge is in a way magnified: ‘[T]he Authority of the Judge (“justice”) can be interpreted as the “integration” of the three others – the latter being unable to form a harmonious unity, not even one that is stable or “eternal”, except on

condition of subordinating themselves en bloc to the Authority of the Judge or to that of “Justice” ’ [this page]. Kojève’s analysis proceeds on two levels. First, by way of an increasing comprehension of what is truly behind the primary (visible?) authorities of the past, future, and present considered as such. No explanation is acceptable that would disregard the existence of the eternal in terms of causality: ‘[I]f Eternity is realized by a “formal cause”, Time realizes the Past qua “material cause”, the Future qua “final cause” and the Present qua “efficient cause” (see Aristotle)’ [this page], without the metaphysical analysis ceasing to ‘justify’ the phenomenological one. This is even more clear in so far as the authority of the judge is isolated in relation to the three others, and considered superior to them: a singularly revealing route for a philosophy bringing innovative and convincing answers to questions raised since the dawn of time by judges and their institution. We have as evidence the existence of at least two visible enigmas. The first of these pertains to the profound reticence aroused in political philosophy by the assertion of a judicial power situated on the same plane as the legislative or executive ones. Undoubtedly, the historical legacy is of great importance here. The famous Article 16 of the 1789 Declaration states that ‘any society in which no provision is made for guaranteeing rights or for the separation of powers, has no Constitution’. If the distinction between the separation of powers and the separation of functions is important, the division of tasks is equally fundamental. However, the existence of a hierarchy is notable especially, but not uniquely, in relations between the legislature and the judiciary. This is why the legislature is prohibited from interfering in the function of judging, in the judicial function, though it can do so by enacting retroactive or interpretative laws, or even by means of ex post facto laws. Conversely, the law of 16–24 August 1790 still charges the courts with abuse of power if they are found ‘taking any part, directly or indirectly, in the exercise of legislative power, obstructing or suspending the execution of the decrees of the legislative body’. While the 1958 Constitution of the Fifth Republic was partly driven by the desire to strengthen the executive, it is understandable that, not having the same legitimacy, it did not use, in relation to justice, the term ‘power’, preferring instead the phrase ‘judicial authority’, and so placing this in a rank subordinate to both government and

parliament. This political will could not, in itself, really damage the authority of the judge as understood by Kojève. Subsequent history has verified this in every respect. And if we have witnessed justice coming gradually into a certain disrepute, this is less an effect of the latter’s frailty than a result of the deviant behaviour of some of those whose mission is to render it. Besides, if they do render justice, it is because they have captured it. But from whom? We could in fact extend the reflection on the decisions of judges: the authority of the matter being judged has, in practice, a higher significance in terms of relative, but pronounced, judicial truth than that of the background. Even though Kojève confirmed in the Esquisse of 1943 that he would limit himself to a description of the juridical phenomenon, he also pursued his research on the foundation of right in line with Hegelian thought. What is important from a Hegelian perspective is the development of right founded on the movement of the concept: ‘the principle of right is not to be found in nature. The sphere of right is the sphere of freedom …’ In other words, it is the development of the idea of freedom that lies at the heart of Hegel’s philosophy of right. However, if the development of the idea is likewise at the heart of Kojève’s philosophy of right, it is here the idea of justice. Kojève postpones the ontological analysis of the notion of authority, limiting himself to ‘a few brief historical remarks’. It is a question of discerning the structure of being as such, as a structure corresponding to the four phenomena of authority, and showing the metaphysical existence of eternity and time. In this respect, none of the four philosophical theories (Hegel, Aristotle, Plato, Scholasticism) supplied a satisfying ontological analysis, since each was conceived as universal, that is to say, neither of them covered all four notions of authority in a total theory, which was to Kojeve’s mind indicative of their respective inadequate ontological foundations. Reflection has therefore to be pushed further. Without coming to a standstill, Kojève’s discourse is overly brief and leaves the reader somewhat disappointed. The lines that he indicates allow us, nevertheless, to discern what must be, in this case, the ontological search for authority ‘after having elaborated the main lines of ontology’. From this ‘supposedly definitive’ approach, the analysis returns towards phenomena, and from there ‘towards being as being’, and, following a ‘perpetual back and forth’ motion, it is possible

to arrive at ‘a truly definitive philosophy, that is to say, one that is true in an absolute manner’. If the approach is presented only in the form of a programme, it will not be an exaggeration of Kojève’s thought to consider that the reference to eternity, otherwise to the eternal – even for the non-believer, agnostic, or atheist – ultimately indicates, well beyond the sacred of the auctoritas, a resort to an irreducible transcendence. The rest of the book, devoted to deductions from the previous analyses, is meant to consolidate their validity as applications. Here, too, the reader is warned that, whether it is a question of political, ethical, or psychological applications, what is presented is not an exhaustive investigation but developments that have as their framework the political sphere and not, for instance, the religious one. Concerning political applications properly speaking, the place of the state is obviously central. Its authority is one, but its support can be individual or collective, which leads to an innovative and shrewd description of several combinations of the ‘pure’ types since antiquity, through medieval times and especially in the modern context. Evidently, a key place is reserved for the division of the three powers (executive, legislative, and judicial), for the various theories of revolutions, for the role of the bourgeoisie as dominant political power (an influence and position that can be explained only in relation to the three modes of time), for tradition as bearer of political value, for the opposition between conservative and radical-liberal parties, the Kantian ‘antinomies of political theory’ pertaining to the position of the judge, and so on. In all these spheres, the significance of the diverse variants resulting from the combinations of the ‘pure’ types is verified with concrete facts. Unsurprisingly, the distinction between the three powers of the state, as the antiphony of both constitutional right and political philosophy, occupies a central place. The conservation of the traditional tripartite division in relation to the four kinds of authority is a problem, as if including the authority of the father were a sensitive point. We have also seen how the authority of the judge is also singular, simply because the political is envious of the judiciary, which it needs, and that ‘the (political) element of judge must be “separated” from the elements

leader and master.’ It is mainly the analysis of the relations between legislative and executive ‘powers’, which, regardless of whether they are repositioned in a current context or not, shows all its potentialities: authority of the leader based on the future, authority of the master based on the present, and, we would be tempted to add, authority of the judge based on the past. Three powers, three temporal modes. But should this trinity be retained at any cost? We can consider a movement in the direction of either retreat or expansion, as there are powers that do not fit into the familiar pre-established structures and that take their revenge for this isolation or ignorance either in the shadow of the law or at least on its margins, such as economic power or the power of the media. In short, no general theory of the state in the future can disregard the various developments relating to the unity or plurality of forms of political authority, as well as its transmission, whether within the same type or from one type to another. There are of course also ‘ethical applications’ of authority, Kojève writes, with ‘an authoritarian ethics’ serving as its necessary support: this is what has to be done to acquire and exert it, its nature and characters varying according to each type. Traditional reason, however, takes into consideration above all, if not exclusively, the authority of the judge. The return to the past, as well as study of the Japanese or Hindu middle ages, would show that a diversity of approaches becomes imperative, especially on the subject of the authority of the master. Investigation becomes all the more necessary in so far as such knowledge would permit a better understanding of many tragic historical conflicts. Above all, it would make it possible to overcome an incomplete analysis informed by a ‘Christian or bourgeois morality’, bound up, at least in its origins, with a ‘servile’ morality opposed to the morality of the ‘masters’. Even if there exist on the plane of ethics extensions of the various types of pure authority, it remains that, in all cases, authority implies at the same time a power to resist but also an absence of resistance – better, an obedience, even if by using this notion, to which the author resorts only rarely, we must add something to his line of thought. Right or duty to resist, active or passive obedience, authority or oppression, legality or legitimacy of power, are so many further questions, not to mention the psychological applications of the authority exercised, and,

especially, endured, where the powers of propaganda, of ‘rational demagogy’ and education come into play, either together or in conflict. Rather than pursue this line of analysis, Kojève illustrates his argument by focusing on current events and a study of the ‘authority that exists in France in 1942’. It is then a question of ‘the Marshal’s authority’. Kojève notes in Philippe Pétain a ‘total political authority – that is to say, the order of the four “pure” types of authority that it implies’: that of the master, victor of Verdun; that of the leader; capable of foreseeing events; that of the judge, impartial and disinterested; and that of the father, attached to the traditions of the past. This presentation does not at any point express any attachment of a political nature, and neither does it judge the legality or legitimacy of the power of Vichy or that of London. ‘We have good reasons to think’, writes Dominique Auffret, ‘that Kojève believes that the enemy must be embraced the better to strangle him … we know that [this reflection] theorised a politics of the worm in the bud, susceptible to different interpretations, but which, for Kojève, must be read in a highly sophisticated way. It suggests that he did not exclude the option of having to live with the reality of the Pétainist state.’31 Despite the example selected being a burning question, Kojève’s argument actually pertained to an approach that was mainly methodical, foreign to either Collaboration or Resistance, to right or left, to the activities of the one or the other. What Kojève underscored, again in a profoundly Hegelian manner, was the authority of a man gathering in his person – as seen by those who noted this fact and in line with his philosophical theory – the characters of the four pure types. Moreover, the author notes that, after two years in power, the authority of the Marshal has not withstood the test of time, as could not have been avoided bearing in mind its very origin. The master, as military leader, was thus necessarily fragile because of his age, which explained the resort to the admiral (François Darlan). As for the father, his reference to tradition was diminished by the necessity to ‘penetrate into the Future’, and Kojève notes a similar weakening of the authority of the judge, with ‘the unfortunate turn that the Riom trials have taken’. The slippages noted here lead us therefore to recognise, in the combination analysed, the primacy of the authority of the leader. But its

persistence, subordinated to the necessity of a ‘project’, was supported in this instance only by a programme, or rather a topos – a ‘logical place [that is] still empty’: the Révolution nationale, because ‘in May 1942, France does not yet have a revolutionary idea’. Even so, Kojève does not ‘make any claim to be able to propose a (national) revolutionary idea to France in 1942’ [this page]. He nevertheless constructs, precisely out of variants of the different types, the form of a state that realises the political authority corresponding to the analysed combination in terms of constitutional structure – even envisaging, in relation to work, the existence of corporations. At the same time, when Kojève was conceiving the notion of authority, one of the great minds to have followed his teaching, Father Gaston Fessard, was pursuing a parallel reflection.32 He too asked key questions about legitimacy: Where is to be found the common good of the people and the authority necessary to lead the will of everyone towards this unique goal? The conclusions reached by both authors complement each other. Master, leader, judge, and father. Kojève reveals and explains a typology that is already present in consciousness and in behaviour, while outlining an enriched philosophy and a programme with a universal susceptibility to further in-depth analysis. His thought surpasses the tripartite schemas discovered in the Indo-European world and in Georges Dumézil’s triad of the flamines33 in Roman religion. It also allows us to understand better in our own time all crises of authority, respect, and obedience. It leads towards a distinction between the four forms of power deduced from the four pure types described. In a world driven by an anguished quest for its bearings, Kojève’s reflection marks a renewed return to reason. 1 [Originally written in Russian, Kojève’s unfinished study on atheism was not intended for publication, as the author himself explains in the introductory notes. The study was deliberately

abandoned in 1931, when Kojève’s argument reached a philosophical impasse. The text was translated from Russian by Nina Ivanoff and published in 1998 by Gallimard, long after Kojève’s death.]

2 [Contrary to a widespread misconception that Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel was based on Queneau’s lecture notes, the entire book consists mainly of complete lectures which

read like conference papers, as well as course summaries at the end of the academic year – all of which are Kojève’s own.]

3 Raymond Aron, Mémoires, Paris: Julliard, 1983, p. 96. [English translation: Memoirs: Fifty Years of Political Reflection, New York: Holmes & Meier, 1990, p. 66.] 4 Aron, Mémoires, p. 99. 5 Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980; see also Giorgio Barberis, Il regno della libertà: Diritto, politica e storia nel pensiero di Alexandre Kojève, Naples: Liguori Editore, 2003.

6 Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, p. 13. 7 Pierre Macherey, ‘Kojève, l’initiateur’, in Magazine littéraire – Hegel et la Phénoménologie de l’Esprit, November 1991, p. 52.

8 [Kojève met Nina Ivanoff in 1934 at the house of one of her close friends, Karsavin’s daughter.

She would become his civil partner for the rest of his life, and then the translator of his Russian manuscripts. She left Russia in 1922 and came to Paris to study chemistry at the Sorbonne.]

9 Dominique Auffret, Alexandre Kojève: La philosophie, l’État et la fin de l’histoire, Paris: Grasset,

1990, pp. 267, 270. See also Léon Poliakov, Mémoires, Paris: Jacques Grancher, 1999, esp. p. 167.

10 [A biographical reference to an incident in which Kojève was undertaking propaganda work

for the Resistance when he was arrested by the Germans. Kojève’s knowledge of Italian art, and

mastery of German, helped save his own life and that of his Greek companion (see Auffret, Alexandre Kojève, pp. 376–7).]

11 Alexandre Kojève, Esquisse d’une phénoménologie de droit, Exposé provisoire, Paris: Gallimard, 1981. The term esquisse (outline) could also be a relevant description of the present volume.

12 Alexandre Kojève, Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007, p. 411.

13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., pp. 59, 137. 15 See in particular Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

16 See Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition, New York: Transaction Publishers, 2004 [1966].

17 [Here Francois Terré is summing up Nisbet’s argument rather than discussing Kojève’s own notion of authority.]

18 See Engels’s ‘On Authority’ (1874), cited in Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition, p. 178.

19 Hannah Arendt, ‘What is Authority?’, in Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought, London: Faber & Faber, 1954. 20 Ibid., p. 92. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 André Magdelain, Jus Imperium Auctoritas: Études de droit romain, Rome: École Française de Rome, 1990, p. 685. 24 Ibid. 25 Pierre Noailles, ‘Fas et jus’: Études de droit romain, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1948, p. 274. 26 Michèle Ducos, Les Romains et la loi, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1984, p. 103. 27 Theodor Mommsen, Le Droit public romain, Paris: De Boccard, 1985, vol. 3, p. 1,034. 28 Magdelain, Jus Imperium Auctoritas, p. 686. 29 Agamben, State of Exception, p. 79. 30 Kojève, Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, p. 30. 31 Auffret, Alexandre Kojève, p. 374. 32 Gaston Fessard, Journal de la conscience française, 1940–1944, Paris: Plon, 2001. 33 [The anthropological work of Georges Dumézil on the notion of authority shows a great deal

of similarity to both Weber’s archetypes and Kojève’s four pure types. It is very likely that Dumézil was familiar with Kojève’s work through the mediation of Henri Corbin who was an

assiduous attendee of the lectures on Hegel, and who shared Kojève’s interest in ‘Oriental’

philosophies and languages. In ancient Rome, the king was the high priest of the city, but he delegated priestly offices to so-called flamines who were selected from patrician families. Used by Dumézil in his 1935–1948 series of comparative studies between Indian Brahmans and Roman flamines to analyse the common foundations of sovereignty in Indo-European societies. The flamines mediated between three gods: Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus. Each god represents a

distinctive form of sovereign power: the sacred, war and commandment, and work and production. See Dumézil, Flamen-Brahman (Annales du Musée Guinet, 1935) and Essai sur la conception indo-européenne de la société et sur les origines de Rome (Gallimard, 1941).]

Preliminary Remarks

It is a curious fact that the problem and notion of authority have been little studied. Questions pertaining to the transfer of authority and its genesis have been the main concern, while the actual essence of this phenomenon has rarely attracted any attention. However, it is obviously impossible to tackle political power or even the structure of the state without knowing what authority is as such. A study of the notion of authority, albeit provisional, is therefore essential, and must precede any study of the question of the state. To say that theories of authority are lacking is not to say that they are nonexistent. If we forget about variants, we can say that four distinct (essentially different and irreducible) theories have been proposed in the course of history: 1. The theological or theocratic theory: primary and absolute Authority belongs to God; all other (relative) authorities are derived from it. (This theory was elaborated mainly by the Scholastics, but the partisans of ‘legitimate’, not to say hereditary, monarchy also claim it as their own.) 2. Plato’s theory: ‘Just’ or ‘legitimate’ authority is based on, and emanates from, ‘justice’ or ‘equity’. Any authority that has a different character is only a pseudo-authority that is in reality nothing other than (more or less brute) force. 3. Aristotle’s theory, in which the justification for authority is found in wisdom, knowledge, and the possibility of anticipating, of transcending the immediate present. 4. Hegel’s theory, which reduces the relationships of authority to that of master and slave (of victor and vanquished), the former having been ready to risk his life to be recognised while the latter

has chosen submission over death. Unfortunately, only the last theory has received comprehensive philosophical elaboration, developed not only on the level of phenomenological description but also that of metaphysical and ontological analysis. The remaining theories have not gone beyond the level of phenomenology, and are not, moreover, in any way complete even in this department. (It must be said that Hegel’s theory has never been truly understood and that it was very quickly forgotten. Thus, Hegel’s most important successor – Marx – completely neglected the problem of Authority.) All four theories are exclusive. Each of them acknowledges only one type of Authority (namely, the one it describes), and sees in the other ‘authoritarian’ phenomena nothing other than a manifestation of pure and simple force. Note: There is, certainly, yet another ‘theory’ of Authority, which sees in the latter nothing but a manifestation of force. But we shall see later on that Force has nothing to do with authority, being even its direct opposite. Reducing Authority to Force is therefore simply either to deny or ignore the existence of the former. It is for this reason that we have not listed this erroneous opinion among the theories of Authority. In order to be able to judge and criticise these theories (indeed to understand them in the proper sense of the word), one would have to start by drawing up a comprehensive list of all phenomena that could be filed under the rubric ‘Authority’ and see if these phenomena correspond (in whole or in part) to one (or several) of the proposed theories. Theories for which there are no corresponding phenomena are to be rejected as false. As for the remaining ones, we must see whether they account for all or only part of the phenomena. To this end, the phenomena of Authority must be subjected to a phenomenological analysis with a view to unearthing ‘pure phenomena’, that is to say, those that are irreducible to one another (or showing, in the case of ‘compound’ phenomena, the ‘pure’ elements of which they are made up). If we find ‘pure’ phenomena that none of the suggested theories

account for, further theories must then be formulated. In other words, the phenomenological analysis (A, I) must answer the question ‘What is it?’ addressed to all phenomena that in a manner of speaking we qualify ‘instinctively’ as authoritarian. It must reveal the essence (the idea: das Wesen) of Authority as such, as well as the structure of this ‘essence’, that is to say, the various irreducible types of its manifestation (while ignoring ‘accidental’ variations caused by simple divergences in local and temporal conditions of the realisation of Authority as such). But phenomenological analysis can carry out its function only on condition of being truly complete. We must be certain that all possible types of Authority have been enumerated and that each one of them has been decomposed into truly simple elements that are irreducible to other elements. This is possible, however, only if the analysis is systematic; that is why we must necessarily move beyond the phenomenological plane and rise to the metaphysical level. The metaphysical analysis (A, II) relates the phenomenon of Authority to the fundamental structure of the objectively real World. In this way, it allows us to see whether the described phenomena correspond to all possibilities provided by the World, and whether a given phenomenon has a simple or compound metaphysical origin. Finally, the ultimate justification of the theory founded on, and guaranteed by, the metaphysical analysis can derive only from an even more profound analysis, which penetrates down to the ontological level. The ontological analysis (A, III) studies the structure of Being as such, and it allows us to understand the whys and wherefores of the (metaphysical) structure of the real World. This same structure, for its part, allows us to classify and analyse systematically (on the phenomenological level) the phenomena in question that appear in this World. Note: In all these three analyses, the notion of God must be used, even assuming that the latter does not exist, being nothing other than a ‘myth’. Since the ‘believer’ has always attributed to God the maximum of authority, it is therefore in Him that this phenomenon can be studied as if under a microscope. We shall avoid applying to Man what we discover in God. And it is precisely if God is nothing more than a ‘myth’ that the

analysis of divine Authority is in fact an analysis of human Authority: without realising it, Man projects onto God what he discovers – more or less unconsciously – in himself, in such a way that he can be studied while studying ‘his’ God. The theory of Authority that results from this triple analysis will be fully guaranteed and justified. It might serve in turn as a starting point for various deductions (B). The theory will have, first of all, political applications (B, I). Assuming that every state presupposes and is based on Authority, the theory of the State can be deduced from the theory of Authority. Secondly, the theory of Authority will have ethical applications (B, II). A correct and justified theory will make it possible to defend Authority and the State (and more specifically, therefore, the authoritarian State) against moral or moralising critiques deduced from non-political notions. In other words, the theory of Authority will make possible the deduction of a specifically political ethics, which would be essentially different from the ‘private’ morality that is generally the basis of attempts to criticise Authority in its being and in its acts. Finally, the theory of authority will have psychological applications (B, III). Knowing what Authority is, the way Man and men must be acted on can be deduced so as either to engender or to maintain an Authority. In what follows, all these questions can only be sketched out. I make no claim to lay down a definitive and complete theory of Authority. We must rather formulate problems and indicate general directions towards their resolution.

A. Analyses

1. PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

1 a) In order to be able to draw up a list of all authoritarian phenomena, we must first be selective with regard to the given phenomena, i.e. we have to be able to distinguish phenomena that realise and reveal the essence of Authority from those that have nothing to do with it (sometimes despite appearances). In other words, we need to begin by providing a definition of Authority – a general one, which can encompass all particular cases; such a definition will be purely ‘formal’ and ‘nominal’. Let us then look for a general definition of Authority There is Authority only where there is (real, or at least possible) movement, change, and action. Authority is held only over that which can ‘react’, that is to say, that which can change according to what or who represents (‘embodies’, realises, or exercises) Authority. And, quite obviously, Authority belongs to the person who can effect change and not to the one subjected to change: Authority is essentially active and not passive. We can therefore say that the real ‘support’ of any authority is necessarily an agent in the proper and strong sense of the term, that is to say, an agent who is held to be free and conscious (and so, either a divine being or a human being, and never something like an animal, for example). Note: Admittedly, the authoritarian act is not necessarily spontaneous:

it is possible to have authority while carrying out an order given by someone else. But the agent invested with authority is assumed to understand this order and accept it freely: a gramophone that transmits the words of the leader has no authority in itself. The being invested with authority is then necessarily an agent, and the authoritarian act is always an absolute (conscious and free) act. However, the authoritarian act is distinguished from all other acts by the fact that it does not encounter opposition from the person or persons towards whom it is directed. This in turn presupposes both the possibility of opposing it and the conscious and voluntary renunciation of realising this possibility. (Examples: if I throw someone out of the window, the fact that he falls has nothing to do with my authority; but I am exerting a manifest authority on him if he throws himself out of the window following an order that I give him, and which, materially, he was in a position to choose not to carry out. The hypnotiser has no authority over the person he has hypnotised. I do not need to exercise my authority to make someone do what he feels like doing and would have done even without my telling him to do it.) Authority is therefore necessarily a relation (between agent and patient): it is an essentially social (rather than individual) phenomenon; there have to be at least two in order for Authority to exist. THEREFORE: Authority is the possibility that an agent has of acting on others (or on another) without these others reacting against him, despite being capable to do so. Or again: by acting with Authority, the agent can change the outward human given without suffering a repercussion from this action, i.e. without himself changing as a result of his action. (Examples: If, in order to make someone get out of my room, I have to use force, I have to change my own behaviour to realise the act in question, and I show through this behaviour that I have no authority; things are completely different if I do not move and this person leaves the room, that is to say, changes, as a result of my simply saying ‘get out!’ If the given order provokes a discussion, that is to say, forces the one who gives it to do something himself – namely engage in a discussion – as a function of this order, then there is no authority. And even less so if the discussion leads to giving up the order or even to a compromise, that is to say, precisely to changing the act that was

supposed to provoke an outward change without itself changing.) Or again, finally: Authority is the possibility of acting without making compromises (in the broad sense of the term). Note: Any discussion is already a compromise because it boils down to this: ‘Do such and such a thing unconditionally.’ ‘No, I shall do it only on condition that you do this other thing, namely that you convince me.’ ‘All right, point granted.’ b) This definition clearly shows that the phenomenon of Authority is related to the phenomenon of Right (see short article on Right).1 In fact: I have a right to something when I can do it without encountering an opposition (reaction), the latter being in principle possible. (Example: If I want to take from someone 100 francs which belong to him, he will ‘react’ and I will suffer the ‘repercussions’ of my act; but if he owes me this money, i.e. if I have a Right over him, I don’t have to suffer any ‘reaction’ when my action transfers the 100 francs from his pocket into mine.) There is, nevertheless, an essential difference between these two ‘related’ phenomena. In the case of Authority, the ‘reaction’ (or opposition) never exceeds the sphere of pure possibility (it is never actualised): its realisation destroys Authority. With Right, by contrast, the ‘reaction’ can be actualised without thereby destroying Right: all that is needed is for this ‘reaction’ to be directed against a person other than the one who has the Right. (In the above example, the violent ‘reaction’ of the debtor need only be directed against a judge, a bailiff, a police officer, and so on.) What follows from this distinction is that, if in principle Authority excludes force, Right implies and presupposes force while being something different from it (there is no Right without court of law, no court without police that can carry out the decisions of the court by force.) Furthermore, the relation noted between Authority and Right explains why every Authority necessarily has a legal or legitimate character (in the eyes of those who recognise it: which goes without saying, since any Authority is necessarily a recognised Authority; not to recognise an Authority is to negate it, and thereby destroy it).

THEREFORE: 1) Exercising an Authority is not only something different from using force (violence), but the two phenomena are mutually exclusive. Generally speaking, one needs to do nothing in order to exert Authority. The mere fact of being compelled to call on the intervention of force (violence) proves that no Authority is involved here. Conversely, it is not possible – without using force – to make people do what they would not have done spontaneously (of their own accord) without calling upon the intervention of Authority. Note: If someone does what I ask him to do out of ‘love’ for me, he does it spontaneously, because he would do anything to please me without my having to intervene or act on him. The relation of Love is therefore essentially something different from the relation of Authority. But since Love produces the same result as Authority, we can easily make a mistake by conflating the two phenomena and saying that the beloved has an ‘authority’ over the lover, or that the person subject to an authority – that is to say, recognising it – has a love for it. This leads to an explanation of the natural human propensity to love the one whose Authority one recognises, as well as recognising the Authority of the one one loves. But the two phenomena remain, nevertheless, clearly distinct. 2) ‘Legal’ or ‘legitimate’ action can also be an ‘authoritarian’ action: all that is needed for this to be so is that the actualisation of possible ‘reactions’ is (freely and consciously) renounced. (In this case, Right exerts an Authority, while remaining a Right in so far as there is a force capable of realising this Right, if need arises – that is to say, if Right ceases to exercise its Authority. In short, Right has authority only for those who ‘recognise’ it, but it remains a Right even for those who are subject to it without ‘recognising’ it.) As for ‘authoritarian’ action, it is by definition ‘legal’ or ‘legitimate’. Because where the possible ‘reaction’ does not materialise – that is to say, if there is no ‘reaction’ whatsoever – there is, a fortiori, no ‘reaction’ against the agent himself. Consequently, it is meaningless, a contradiction in adjecto, to speak of an ‘illegitimate’ or ‘illegal’ Authority. The person who ‘recognises’ an Authority (and there is no ‘unrecognised’ Authority) recognises by the same token its ‘legitimacy’. To deny the legitimacy of Authority is not to recognise it – in other words, by this very act, to destroy it. The existence of an Authority can therefore, in a concrete case, be denied; but no ‘Right’ can be opposed to a real

Authority (that is to say, a ‘recognised’ Authority). Note 1: Many authors, in particular Christians, have stated that all political Power is ‘legitimate’. This is true only in so far as Power embodies an Authority. However, we shall see later on that there is a possible dissociation between Power and Authority. A Power devoid of Authority is not necessarily legitimate. We can certainly say that any (revolutionary) action directed against a Power invested with Authority would be ‘illegal’ and ‘illegitimate’; but this is a meaningless tautology, inasmuch as Authority precisely excludes all action directed against it. Note 2: It can be said that Legality is the cadaver of Authority; or more precisely, its ‘mummy’ – a corpse that endures while being deprived of a soul or life. 3) Our definition of Authority can also be seen as close to the only generally valid definition of the Divine: divine is – for me – anything that can act on me without my having the possibility of reacting on it. (Example: So long as men assumed that the stars exerted an influence on them and thought that they had no means to act upon the stars, they deified them. But when they learned from Newton that every (physical) action is equal to the reaction it provokes, the stars – and all the natural World in general – were permanently ‘disenchanted’.) This definition explains why man, on the one hand, has always attributed the summum of Authority to that which was (or represented) for him the Divine, and, on the other hand, has endowed all existing (human) Authority (that is to say, that recognised by him), with a ‘sacred’ or divine character (see the theocratic theory of Authority discussed below, which maintains the divine origin of all Authority). However, the definition of the Divine differs from that of Authority: in the case of divine action, (human) reaction is absolutely impossible; in the case of (human) authoritarian action, reaction is, on the contrary, necessarily possible, but does not happen owing to the conscious and voluntary renunciation of this possibility. We can certainly modify our definition of Authority in such a way that it encompasses divine action, by saying that (divine or human) action is authoritarian in so far as it does not provoke any reaction. We can then speak about a divine Authority. But it will nevertheless have to be carefully distinguished from human Authority, which presupposes not only the absence of a real reaction, but also the presence of the possibility

of reaction. We prefer, however, to keep to our definition of Authority, even if we have to say that it is an essentially human (social) phenomenon, with divine action being only related to authoritarian action and not identical to it. It is also possible to say that, in contrast to Authority strictly speaking – that is to say, human Authority – divine ‘Authority’ is essentially unassailable: every possibility of reaction being excluded, Authority must be exerted indefinitely as long as the being who embodies it exists. However, seeing that by definition this being cannot be modified, that is to say, damaged and ultimately destroyed from outside, it is natural to suppose that it exists eternally. It is also possible to say that divine ‘authority’ differs from (human) authority strictly speaking in so far as it is eternal. Or, to put it differently: the Divine exerts its ‘Authority’ without any risk of losing it, without any risk at all. Human Authority, by contrast, is essentially perishable: at any moment, the voluntarily repressed possibility of reacting may be actualised, and thus annul Authority. The exercise of (human) Authority, therefore, necessarily implies an element of risk to the person who exerts it by the very fact that he is exerting it – albeit nothing more than the risk of losing it, with all that ensues from this loss. Consequently, every human Authority that exists must have a ‘cause’, a ‘reason’ or a ‘justification’ for its existence: a raison d’être. To note that it exists is not in itself sufficient for recognising it (and by that very fact prolonging its existence). We shall therefore have to see what the causes, reasons or justifications of Authority are. And this study will allow us to distinguish between different irreducible types of this Authority, and better to understand the proposed theories that are linked to them.

2 a) All forms of (human) Authority have this in common: they make possible the exercise of an action that does not provoke a reaction, because those who could have reacted abstain from doing so consciously and voluntarily. Conversely, wherever men submit to an action (that

they would not have effected by themselves) by consciously and voluntarily renouncing their faculty to react against it, it is possible to observe the intervention of an Authority. But since the reaction always remains possible and the renunciation is conscious and voluntary, the question arises as to why this is the case. Every Authority raises the question of knowing why it exists, that is to say, why it is ‘recognized’ by people submitting to acts that ensue from it without reacting against them. The answers to these questions are diverse, and to each different answer corresponds a particular type of Authority. First of all, a list needs to be drawn up of all possible types of Authority. Note: We could count a good twenty of these. But so long as we do not have a theory of Authority, we can never be sure that this list is complete. Afterwards, the ‘pure’ types, that is to say, the ones that are irreducible to others, must be extricated (and described) to show how the ‘composite’ types are constituted by a combination of those ‘simple’ or ‘pure’ types. It is out of the question for this whole phenomenological analysis to be carried out here. Let us assume it is already done and sum up the result of our analysis without having to ‘demonstrate’ it, so to speak. Let us then say that we can distinguish four (simple, pure or elementary) types of Authority: α) The Authority of the Father (or parents in general) over the Child. (Variants: the Authority arising from a great age gap – the Authority of the elderly over the young, the Authority of tradition and of those who hold it; the Authority of the dead – a will; the Authority of the ‘Author’ over his oeuvre – and so on.) Note on the Authority of the dead: Generally speaking, Man has more Authority after his death than during his lifetime: a Will has more Authority than the order given by a man still alive; a promise is more binding after the death of the person to whom it was made; the orders of the dead father are respected better than the ones he gave during his lifetime – and so on. The reason this is so is that it is physically

impossible to react against the dead. In that sense, they have Authority by definition. But this impossibility of reacting assures the Authority of the dead a divine (sacred) character: the exercise of Authority by the dead does not entail any risk to them, hence both the strength and weakness of this authority. Overall, this is a peculiar case of divine authority. β) The Authority of the Master over the Slave. (Variants: the Authority of the Nobleman over the Serf; the Authority of the Soldier over the Civilian; the Authority of Man over Woman; the Authority of the Victor over the Vanquished, and so on.) Note on the Authority of the Victor: It goes without saying that, in order for Authority to exist, the Victor must be ‘recognised’ as such by the Vanquished, that is to say, the Vanquished must ‘recognise’ his defeat. Compare the German slogan im Felde unbesiegt (undefeated in battle), which destroyed the emergent Authority of the victors of 1918; the latter, having not had their victory ‘recognised’, had no Authority; they thus had to call on force – with the known result that followed. γ) The Authority of the Leader (dux, Duce, Führer, leader,2 and so on) over the Band. (Variants: the Authority of the Superior – director, officer, and so on – over the Subordinate – employer, soldier, and so on; the Authority of the Master over the Pupil; the Authority of the Scholar, the Technician, and so on; the Authority of the Soothsayer, the Prophet, and so on.) Note on the Authority of the Officer: This Authority is a good example of compound Authority. Besides his specific Authority as a Leader, which he exerts over soldiers, he also benefits from the Authority of the Master that all soldiers have over civilians; with regard to fellow soldiers, he generally possesses as well the Authority of the Father; and finally, he embodies also the Authority of the Judge, which we shall discuss right away. δ) The Authority of the Judge. (Variants: the Authority of the Arbitrator; the Authority of the Supervisor, the Moderator, and so on; the Authority of the Confessor; the Authority of the Just or honest man – and so on.)

Note on the Authority of the Confessor: This is again another good example of compound Authority: besides his Authority as Judge, the Confessor enjoys the benefits derived from the Authority of the Leader in his capacity as ‘spiritual advisor’. And while he enjoys the benefits of the Authority of the Father, he lacks that of the Master. Note on the Authority of the Just: To tell the truth, this is the purest case of the Authority of the Judge, because the Judge in the narrow sense possesses, besides his – spontaneous – Authority as Judge, the derivative Authority of the civil servant. b) We have therefore four types of ‘pure’ Authority. But we have seen that it is also possible to distinguish four irreducible theories of Authority. This leads us to suppose that each one of these theories, which is in the eyes of its author a general theory of Authority, is in reality nothing but a theory of one of the four particular types listed above. Let us see if this is truly the case. We have then (in chronological order), the theories of: Plato Aristotle the Scholastics, etc. (theological theory) Hegel Let us start with the last of these. Hegel’s theory of authority takes the form of a theory of the relation between Master and Slave. But it seems that Hegel saw in this relation a general theory of Authority, considering all forms of Authority as derivatives of the Authority of the Master in relation to the Slave. In any case, he did not elaborate any other theory of Authority. Hegel’s theory (very sophisticated, philosophically speaking) accounts perfectly well for our second type of ‘pure’ Authority, that is to say, the Authority of the Master over the Slave. Here is how it works: (For more details, see my article entitled ‘Autonomy and Dependence of SelfConsciousness’, in Mesures.3) Mastery arises from the Struggle to death for ‘recognition’

(Anerkennung). The two opponents each posit for themselves an end that is essentially human, non-animal and non-biological: that of being ‘recognised’ in their human reality or dignity. But the future Master endures the trial of Struggle and Risk, while the future Slave fails to control his (animal) fear of death. He thus surrenders, recognises his defeat, recognises the superiority of the victor and subjugates himself as a Slave to his Master. This is how the absolute Authority of the Master arises in his relations with his Slave. Thus: the Master overcomes in himself his animal share (which manifests itself as the instinct for self-preservation) and subordinates it to that which is specifically human in him (this human element manifests itself as the desire for ‘recognition’, as ‘vanity’ that is devoid of any ‘vital’ biological value). The Slave, by contrast, subordinates the human to the natural, to the animal. It is consequently possible to say that the Authority of the Master over the Slave is similar to the Authority of Man over the beast and Nature in general, with one difference: […]4 the ‘animal’ is conscious of its inferiority and accepts it freely. It is precisely for this reason that there is Authority in this case: the Slave consciously and voluntarily renounces the opportunity he has of reacting against the action of the Master; he does so because he knows that this reaction puts his life at risk and because he does not want to accept this risk. Hegel’s theory is therefore indeed a theory of Authority. And it indeed explains the why and wherefore of the Authority of the Master over the Slave. It is therefore an accurate theory of this particular type of (pure) Authority. But it is inadequate for the other types of Authority. For example, it does not account for the Authority of the Leader. A Master does not have Authority only in relation to the Slave (qua Master, in the narrow sense); he can also have (in his capacity as Leader) an Authority in relation to other Masters. But Hegel’s theory does not account for the existence of an Authority of the Leader among men who are socially equal. And it applies even less to facts pertaining to the Authority of the Father or the Judge, where the element of Struggle and Risk of life is totally lacking. By contrast, Hegel’s theory explains the relation between the case of the Authority of the Master and the cases that we have enumerated as its ‘variants’. While taking into account the fact that the Authority of the Nobleman, of the Soldier, of Man and of the Victor all have a compound

character, it must be said that the predominant element that remains their ultimate basis (or ‘justification’) is nothing other than the Authority of the Master, founded on Risk. This is obvious for the Soldier and the Civilian, and for the Victor and the Vanquished. But it is equally unquestionable that the Nobleman is originally and before everything else a warrior, whereas the Serf does not take part in war. Finally, it seems that it is ultimately for the same reason that Man derives the Authority he has over Woman. Let us now move on to Aristotle’s theory. It is also presented as a theory of Mastery. But in reality it applies to a completely different type of Authority. According to Aristotle, the Master has the right to exercise an Authority over the Slave because he can anticipate, whereas the latter only notices immediate needs and is guided exclusively by these. It is therefore, if we like, the Authority of the ‘intelligent’ over the ‘unthinking’, of the ‘civilised’ over the ‘barbarian’, of the ‘ant’ over the ‘grasshopper’, of the ‘clear-sighted’ over the ‘blind’. (It is also the Authority of the person who gives an order over the person who carries it out.) The person who realises that he sees less well and less far than another readily allows himself to be led or guided by this other person. He thus consciously renounces all possible reactions; he submits to the other’s acts without going against them, without protesting, without discussing them, without even asking questions: he follows the other ‘blindly’. There is, therefore, indeed Authority in this case. But this theory of Authority has nothing to do with the Authority of the Master, which is, by contrast, well explained by Hegel’s theory. Aristotle’s theory applies to the case of the Authority of the Leader in relation to the Band: it accounts for the Authority of the dux, the Duce, the Führer, the political leader,5 and so on. Let us consider a familiar example. A band of kids gather to play. One of these kids proposes to go and steal apples from the orchard next door. Immediately, by doing so, he casts himself in the role of the band’s leader. He became this leader because he saw further than the others, because it was he alone who thought out a project, while the others did not manage to get beyond the level of immediate facts. Now, everything suggests that the first ‘true’ leaders emerged in the same manner: a band

of ‘Masters’, ‘aristocratic brigands’, rally around a Leader who proposes a plan for a raid; and he is invested with an absolute Authority as long as the execution of his project lasts: he is a ‘dictator’, or even a ‘king’ (compare the spontaneous origin of the Authority of the Leader in Xenophon, Anabasis, III, 1, 4, 11–14, 24–7, 30–4, 36–47; also II, 2–5). Note: We are talking here of the Leader of a Band, and not of the Leader of a State, whose authority is complex, with that of the Leader only one of its elements. We shall discuss this again in B, I. For the time being, let us just say the following: sociologists have established that the State generally comes into being wherever a band of conquerors, of ‘Masters’, settle in a conquered country and more or less subjugate the aboriginals. These vanquished are the ‘subjects’ of the victors who enjoy, in relation to the former, the Authority of Masters. The Leader of the victors is therefore primarily a Leader (in relation to his ‘equals’, to the Masters), and secondly a Master (in relation to his ‘subjects’, the Slaves, the vanquished). It is by being simultaneously Leader and Master that he is Head of State or Sovereign, ‘King’ or ‘Dictator’ in the proper sense of the term. Which does not mean, however, that he is only a Leader and a Master. He can additionally enjoy the benefits of the Authority of the Father and the Judge. Aristotle’s theory accounts then for the Authority of the Leader of a band. And it also allows us to explain the relation between this Authority and what we called its ‘variants’. Things are clear as far as the Authority of the Superior over his Subordinates is concerned. The Director and the Officer can see further than the Employee or the Soldier: they have information about the future; they contrive plans and projects, while the Subordinates cannot see anything other than immediate facts and daily needs. Even if the Superiors are just relaying orders coming from further up in the hierarchy, they know these before their Subordinates, and so they enjoy the benefit of prescience over the latter. It is similar with the Authority of the Master over the Pupil: the pupil renounces all reactions against the acts of the Master because he thinks that the latter is already in a position that he will reach only much later: the Master is more advanced than he is. The same observations apply in the case of the Authority of the Scholar or the Technician, and so on: they see the bottom of things while

the uneducated see only the surface: in this sense, they see better than the latter, they have a broader and more profound view of things. Hence comes their ability to foresee events. Such ability has always confirmed (and even created) the Authority of the Scholar. Finally, the Authority of the Soothsayer, the Prophet, the Oracle, and so on, is a particularly striking example of Authority in line with Aristotle’s theory: the unquestionable Authority of the Soothsayer (the Oracle) is a pure case of the Authority of the Leader. By contrast, Aristotle’s theory does not account for the Authority of the Master over the Slave, as thoroughly explained by Hegel, and neither does it have anything to say about the Authority of the Father or that of the Judge. It is true that the Father of a family can be at the same time the Leader of a band (if the family itself is this band). But such Authority of the Leader has nothing to do with the Authority he holds as a Father, and it is again something different from the Authority of the Master over his pupil. Because, quite obviously, the Authority of the Father has nothing to do with his personal character, as is the case in all forms of the (pure) Authority of the Leader, and in compound Authorities where the element ‘Leader’ is involved or predominant. As for the Judge, his Authority has nothing to do with project, prescience or prediction. He does not propose anything, he only ‘judges’ that which is. And the Authority of the Judge does not lie in his wide knowledge of the law: his Authority lies exclusively in his ‘justice’. It is therefore not Aristotle’s theory, but Plato’s, which accounts for cases of the ‘pure’ Authority of the Judge. Let us then see what the Platonic theory of Authority is. According to Plato, every Authority is – or at least, should have been – founded on Justice or Equity. All other forms of Authority are illegitimate. Which means, practically, that they are unstable, nondurable, momentary, ephemeral, accidental. They are nothing but pseudo-authorities. In reality, all power that does not rest on Justice does not rest on any Authority in the proper sense of the term, either. The hold on power is maintained only through force (through ‘terror’). But such a hold is necessarily precarious. There is no doubt that this theory is false in its exclusion of other forms of Authority. The Authority of the Master or the Leader, as such,

obviously has nothing to do with Justice. And the Authority of the Father is also independent of whether or not he embodies Justice. In order to see this, all we have to do is mention that there are conflicts between filial obedience and the sense of Justice. A Father’s order can also be executed without discussion (without ‘reaction’), even if it contradicts what the son believes is fair, and the same goes for the Master and the Leader. But, on the other hand, the mere fact that such conflicts exist proves that Justice can found a sui generis Authority, capable of counterbalancing, or even destroying, the Authority of the Master, the Leader or the Father. (Examples are too numerous and well known to bother with citing them.) Justice can therefore serve as the foundation of a sui generis Authority, and Plato was only wrong in denying the independent existence of the other three types of Authority. Let us mention the fable (related by Herodotus, I, 96–100) of the birth of the monarchy among the Medes. The Medes used to live in a state of anarchy (the State of Nature, as it came to be known later) in which absolute injustice prevailed (Hobbes’s bellum omnium contra omnes). One of them (who out of his ambition aspired to power) started practising justice. The others came to him to submit their disputes, which he settled as a respected arbiter. When his clients became too numerous, he refused to receive all of them, saying that he had also to take care of his own business. So the Medes made him King in order to discharge him of private concerns. After he became king, he asked for ‘guards to strengthen his power’. After he got what he asked for, ‘he carried on observing justice, but he also combined it with severity’, prosecuting the guilty even when no one asked him to do so. (In other words, he went from being an arbiter to becoming judge and prosecutor.) This is certainty nothing but a fable. But it shows that it is not contrary to psychology to establish a power and then subsequently an absolute Authority on Justice alone. And since, in order for Authority to exist, it only has to be recognised in practice, it is in principle possible that the Authority of Justice becomes a total Authority (and subsequently an absolute power), as Plato wished. To be sure, political power has in fact seldom had Justice as its base: if this element was involved at all, it has always been accompanied by

others (Authority of the Leader, of the Master or the Father) and dominated by them. But the fact remains that Justice can be one of the elements of total Authority. There is therefore one pure and irreducible type of Authority that can be called the Authority of the Judge. Indeed, the Authority of the Judge cannot be explained other than by Plato’s theory. And it is obvious that the principle of Justice or Equity also belongs with the types of Authority we have listed as variants of the ‘pure’ type of the Authority of the Judge. The Judge in the strict sense of the word is certainly a civil servant who depends on a political power, that is to say, on a State, and presupposes this (see the above-cited fable of Herodotus). In order to be truly a Judge, he has to be assisted by force and base himself on laws recognised by a State. In other words, his power is complex and his very Authority seems necessarily to imply other elements besides that of Justice (that of the Leader, for instance). But the fact remains that the somewhat personal Authority of the Judge pertains solely to his ‘equity’, being therefore a case of the pure Authority of Justice. This can be clearly seen in the variant of the Authority of the Arbiter (which is, to tell the truth, not a variant, but the pure type; it is the Authority of the Judge that is a variant of the Authority of the Arbiter). If we do not react against the acts (‘judgements’) of an Arbiter (freely chosen), it is because we assume his impartiality, that is to say, precisely the fact that he embodies, so to speak, Justice. Thus, the ‘Just’ or ‘Honest’ man possesses an unquestionable Authority, even if he does not hold the position of an Arbiter. Generally speaking, the potentia of impartiality, of objectivity, disinterestedness, and so on, always gives rise to an Authority; and the Authority of a Supervisor, a Censor, and so on, cannot be explained without bringing in the element of what we called the Authority of the Judge. This element is also involved without any doubt in the Authority of the Confessor. The three investigated theories, therefore, correspond to three distinct and irreducible types of Authority. There remains the fourth pure type of Authority – that of the Father over his children – and a fourth theory – namely the scholastic or theological (theocratic) theory of Authority. It is therefore natural to assume that this theory – in principle itself, too, universal – corresponds in reality only to the fourth type of Authority, in the same way that each of the other theories corresponds

to one pure type. The correlation between theological theory and the Authority of the Father seems at first sight rather artificial. However, let us note that the theological theory according to which every true and legitimate Authority (which is something other than simple force) derives from God and is nothing other than a transfer of divine Authority, always implies the principle of the transmission of the (human, and in fact political) Authority of the Head of State through inheritance. And yet, it is only in the Authority of the Father that the notion of heredity is naturally involved: this Authority is founded on the relation between parents and children; it is natural to accept that the Authority of the Father passes – like an inheritance – to the Son (inasmuch as he himself becomes Father and his own Father passes away). Given that, according to scholastic theory, every (human) Authority has a divine essence, in order to study this theory we need to investigate the relation of this absolute Authority to God. Given that God incarnates the summum of authority, it is no surprise that we find in the theological theory all the four pure types we have enumerated. God is for man ‘Master’ and ‘Lord’. The Authority of the Master is therefore an integral element of global divine Authority. But God is also a ‘Leader’, the ‘Lord of hosts’ (Seboath), the political leader6 who guides his people while having knowledge in advance of their destinies. The element of the Authority of the Leader, therefore, is also involved in divine Authority. At the same time, ‘divine Justice’ is a religious category of primary importance, God being always conceived as the supreme Judge of man, as the sovereign embodiment of Justice and Equity: divine Authority integrates, therefore, also the element of the Authority of the Judge. But we already have three theories accounting for these three types of pure Authority. The Scholastic theory is interesting for us only in so far as it can account for the last type of pure Authority, namely that of the Father. Indeed, the global divine Authority implies in practice this last type of Authority: God is also ‘Father’, ‘our Father in heaven’. Theological theory must therefore account for what we have called the Authority of the Father, and for that which the three other theories cannot explain. Note: We have seen that divine Authority differs from human

Authority in the fact that it implies no ‘risk’, since all reactions against the acts of God are absolutely impossible. In the case of the Authority of the Judge, this does not present any inconvenience, since divine judgements are infallible. Similarly, in the Authority of the Leader, divine power remains an Authority and not a simple force, inasmuch as God is assumed to be omniscient. But it is no less the case with the Authority of the Master: divine omnipotence can in no way establish its Authority, being, in the end, nothing other than a sublimation of force. We have seen that the Authority of the Master (which is something different from ‘power’ or ‘potency’ derived from his ‘strength’) is exclusively founded on the Risk he runs in his struggle to the death. But this is out of the question in the case of God. Theological theory cannot, therefore, account for the case of the pure Authority of the Master. And the Scholastics must have realised this more or less unconsciously, since we see a pronounced tendency in them towards eliminating the term ‘Master’ in favour of ‘Father’. As for God as Love, this has nothing to do with Authority strictly speaking: in this aspect, God wants to make men act spontaneously; that is to say, as Love, as both lover and beloved. He eschews His Authority. Compare, however, what has been said above on the affinities between Love and Authority. The notion of ‘God the Father’ is evident the moment God is considered the Creator of the World and of Man (that is to say, in JudeoChristian and Islamic theologies). In so far as Scholastic theory explained or ‘justified’ divine Authority by the notion of ‘God the Father’, it adopted therefore the idea of Creation. God is the ‘father’ of men because He has effectively ‘engendered’ them by ‘creating’ them (ex nihilo): He is their (‘formal’) cause. But at the same time, an ‘effect’ cannot ‘disown’ its ‘cause’: if the cause acts on the effect (by producing it), the effect cannot react on the cause. And inasmuch as men have understood that they are God’s work, they abandon the vain illusion of the possibility of a reaction against divine acts: they ‘recognise’ divine Authority that, as authority (and not only as ‘potency’, force), is nothing other than this ‘recognition’ (that is to say, the conscious and voluntary renunciation of ‘reactions’). This ‘justification’ of Authority by the relation of ‘cause’ to ‘effect’ has nothing to do with its ‘justifications’ by ‘prediction’, ‘risk’ or ‘equity’. It is therefore a theory distinct from those previously discussed. At the same

time, it is obvious that it applies only to the Authority of the Father and not to that of the Leader, the Master or the Judge. In general, however, Scholastic theory tries to interpret the ensemble of divine Authority as an Authority of the Father (of the Creator, the ‘Cause’). Note: The so-called ‘cosmological’ proof of the existence of God is one ‘justification’ or a metaphysical explanation of divine Authority, conceived in the guise of the Authority of the Father (= cause). The socalled ‘ontological’ proof is an attempt at an ontological analysis of the same Authority of the Father-cause. As for the so-called ‘physicotheological’ proof, it ‘justifies’ divine Authority considered in its aspect as Authority of the Leader. At the same time, this theory reduces all human Authority to divine Authority. It thus tends to interpret every (human) Authority as a variant of the Authority of the Father. (Hence the tendency to underline the ‘paternal’ element in the Authority of political powers.) The Authority of the Father is the ‘Authority’ of the cause over the effect. But the cause transmits, by definition, its ‘essence’ (or its ‘power’) to the effect. It is therefore natural to accept the principle of heredity in the transmission of the Authority of the Father (= cause). This is how the theological theory of Authority has become the theory of hereditary Monarchy. To be sure, the notion of God the creator is specifically JudeoChristian, or even scholastic. But every theology and, accordingly, every theological theory of Authority, entails notions that are analogous to the idea of creation. God is always, more or less, a custodian God: He is some sort of a ‘cause’ to the social or political group that ‘recognises’ His Authority. He is the one who guarantees continuity (‘filiation’) – that is to say, the unity of the group – and fixes its ‘personality’, its ‘individuality’ (that is distinct from others), by determining its origin. Hence the ‘traditional’ character of the divinity of the (sacred) divine: God is always the God of ancestors (‘the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’). Hence also the (sacred) divine character of every ‘tradition’: the past that determines the present is generally reduced, eventually, to a divine origin. We can therefore say that scholastic theory accounts not only for the Authority of the Father, strictly speaking, but also for the ‘pure’ type of the Authority of the Father in general, as well as the types of (‘derived’ or ‘complex’) Authority that we have listed as the ‘variants’. We can

therefore classify this theory along with the other three, while stripping it of its theo-logical character. In other words, without ascribing all ‘causes’ to an ultimate divine cause, we can say that the Authority of the Father (as well as its ‘variants’) can be explained, in the final analysis, by the (real or supposed) fact of the impossibility of (or, more precisely, the conscious and voluntary renunciation of) any ‘reaction’ on the part of the ‘effect’ against the action of the ‘cause’ upon it. This is clear in the case of the ‘pure’ Authority of the Father. As for the ‘variant’ of the Authority of the Elderly over the Young, we also find (besides other elements) the notion of ‘paternity’ or ‘cause’: it is the notion of ‘generation’, of ‘collective’ paternity, the generation of the elderly (the ‘old generation’) representing the generation of the fathers of the young (the ‘new generation’). The same goes for the Authority of Tradition and those who possess it. The latter are not only, as elderly, the ‘material’ (physical) fathers of the men of the moment: as representing Tradition, they are their ‘spiritual fathers’, embodying the ‘cause’ that has made of the contemporaries what they are. And it is in their capacity as this ‘cause’, which determines the given social, political and cultural reality, that Tradition as such exerts an Authority: ‘reaction’ against it is voluntarily and consciously renounced because such a ‘reaction’ would be a reaction against oneself, a kind of suicide. From this viewpoint, the Authority of the Dead can be explained by the fact that the dead are even more ‘cause’ than the living (the ‘cause’ generally disappears after it has produced its ‘effect’, and does not exist in or as the latter). But the purest case of the Authority of the Father, considered as the ‘authority’ of the ‘cause’ over the effect, is perhaps the Authority that an Author (in the broadest sense of the word) has over his Work. (For example: the Authority of a leader of a literary, artistic or other ‘school of thought’; the Authority of the founder of a ‘colony’; the Authority of a Baden-Powell among the scouts – and so on.)

3 a) We have therefore arrived at the following results. There are four irreducible types of (human) Authority:

Father (Cause) Master (Risk) Leader (Project – Prediction) Judge (Equity, Justice) To each one of these types corresponds a theory: Father: Scholastics Master: Hegel Leader: Aristotle Judge: Plato As a matter of fact, the concrete cases of real Authority are always complex: all four pure types are combined in them. But we can nevertheless distinguish them on the basis of the predominance of one – or several – of these pure types: a person can be mostly Leader, or mostly Judge, and so on. ‘Predominance’ means either that the Authority of a determinate kind is comparatively ‘greater’ than the degree of Authority in the other ones (we ‘react’ less when so-and-so acts in his capacity as Leader than when he acts in his capacity as Judge, for example), or that Authority of a determinate kind provides the ‘basis’ for the Authority of other kinds of Authority (for example: we do not ‘react’ against the ‘Judgements’ of so-and-so because he has Authority in his capacity as Leader; or, on the contrary, we do not ‘react’ against his ‘projects’ because he has Authority in his capacity as Judge). Note: It seems, moreover, that an Authority that provides the ‘basis’ for another one has thereby the ‘greatest’ prominence. We can, moreover, establish a hierarchy of the dominant types of Authority where there is more than one (for example: if there is a ‘predominance’ of the Leader and Judge types, we can distinguish the case when the Leader ‘prevails’ over the Judge from the one where the Judge ‘prevails’ over the Leader). Supposing that this is the case, we can draw up a comprehensive list of all possible types of Authority. In this way we get the following: – four pure types (F, L, M, J) – six combinations of two pure types (FL, FM, FJ, LM, and so on)

with two variants of each (FL and LF, and so on) – that is, twelve types – four combinations of three types, with six variants – that is, twenty-four types – one combination of four types, with twenty-four variants (FLMJ, LFMJ, JMFL, MFJL, and so on) We thus end up, in total, with sixty-four types of Authority (four pure and sixty compound), or fifteen (four pure and eleven compound) if ‘variants’ are not taken into consideration. If our theory is accurate, this list exhausts all possibilities. It would only be a matter of verifying whether all of them are realised or realisable. In each concrete case, we could see to which (pure or compound) type it belongs. And we would need to determine what all these combinations mean (and would have to draw all of the consequences from this meaning). Of course, it is out of the question to undertake here the work of a comprehensive phenomenological analysis. We shall only say that total Authority, which encompasses all four pure types, must be carefully distinguished from selective Authorities, which integrate only one, two or three of these types. This is because it is very important to know to which sphere a given Authority extends, in order to know what it is and be able to say accordingly what must be done in order to determine the best way to establish, exercise, keep and transmit this Authority. To be sure, as we have already said, every real Authority is in fact, more or less, total. In other words, by granting someone the Authority of one of the four pure types (that of the Leader, for example), we are obviously compelled also to grant him the Authority of the three others (as ‘derivative’ authorities). Similarly, every holder of a selective Authority has a natural tendency to transform it into a total Authority. On the other hand, observation of the complete absence of one (or several) pure type(s) of Authority generally induces the cancellation of the existing type(s) (for instance: observing that a Leader is ‘hopeless’ as a Judge, or even ‘unjust’, we also tend no longer to recognise his Authority as Leader). The existence of selective Authorities is beyond doubt. In other words,

the (relative) absence of a pure type of Authority does not actually cancel the Authority of another type, but only weakens it. This leads us to distinguish absolute Authority from relative alternatives. We can talk about an absolute Authority where none of the acts of its possessors induces a ‘reaction’. As for relative Authorities, they can be classified according to their relative ‘greatness’, that is to say, the relation between the number of all acts and the number of acts that do not induce any ‘reaction’ (even if only in the guise of doubt or discussion). Obviously, absolute Authority in the strong sense of the word is never realised in fact. Only God is held to possess it (or more precisely, God should have possessed it). And it is also obvious that an absolute Authority can only be total. But is it possible to say that a total Authority is necessarily absolute? And, generally speaking, is it possible to establish (a priori) theoretical relations between one type of (pure or complex) Authority and its ‘scope’ (its relative ‘greatness’)? (For example, is it possible to say that, in principle, in the case of the Authorities Leader + Judge, the variant Leader–Judge represents an Authority relatively greater than that which corresponds to the variant Judge–Leader?) Undoubtedly, the study of these questions is extremely interesting, both theoretically and practically (in politics, for example). But we can neither carry out such a study nor even initiate it here. Note: It is a study of this kind that will allow us to resolve in a definitive fashion the problem of the ‘Separation of Powers’ and that of the ‘Constitution’, as well as the structure of the State in general (see below, B, I). b) Likewise, we can touch only lightly on another problem that is obviously related to the phenomenological analysis of Authority, namely that of the genesis and transmission of Authority. In terms of its genesis, Authority can be either spontaneous or conditioned. In the first case, it is spontaneously generated by acts emanating from the person possessing it, without presupposing any outward ‘act’ or departing from the preliminary existence of any other given Authority. In the case of conditioned Authority, it comes into being following acts other than those of its possessor, and it generally

presupposes the existence of another Authority on which it depends. The study of the conditioned birth of Authority, therefore, leads to the study of the transmission of Authority. All four types of pure Authority are assumed to have a spontaneous origin or genesis. It is personal risk that engenders the Authority of the Master, and there is no need whatsoever for any other Authority to predate it: we can easily think of the appearance of the ‘first’ Master on earth ‘before’ the existence of the Authorities of the Leader, the Judge, or even the Father. But we can equally suppose that the ‘first’ Authority was that of the Leader: the personal act of the ‘first’ man proposing the ‘first’ project was able to establish his Authority at an ‘epoch’ when there was not, generally speaking, any Authority yet. We can also accept the fable of Herodotus (cited above), according to which the ‘first’ Authority was that of the Judge, spontaneously engendered by the personal exercise of Justice by a single individual. As for the Authority of the Father, there would seem to be no grounds to speak of a spontaneous genesis, because an individual does nothing to obtain it. In fact, however, this case does not differ from the preceding ones: in the broad sense of the word, something needs to be ‘done’ to obtain the Authority of the Father – namely, one needs to become a father (or, in the derivative case, reach a more or less advanced age). The only difference is that, in this case, all men are, in principle, able to ‘do’ what it takes to achieve the Authority of the Father (because all that one has to do is to live long enough – which is still not true for everyone), while in the three other cases of Authority what is involved is an ‘action’ in the narrow sense of the term, personal acts that require some special ‘talent’ that cannot be found in everyone. In any case, we can easily imagine the emergence of the ‘first’ Father, invested with a corresponding Authority, at an ‘epoch’ where no other Authority yet exists. And it is indeed the Father himself who engenders the Authority that he enjoys. By contrast, the cases of a conditioned origin must be distinguished from the cases of a spontaneous one. According to the ‘social contract’ thesis, for example, the ‘first’ (political) Authority has its origin in a (collective) decision – that is to say, an act, not that of the person who will exercise Authority, but of those who will be subject to it. Authority is, therefore, conditioned here by something other than itself, by acts other

than those of the person who will embody it. And the same applies when the man who has to embody Authority is randomly chosen (in the sense of drawing lots) or designated by something which has nothing to do with his own acts (‘merits’) or his ‘personality’ in general (the case of the Dalai Lama, for instance). But we can ask ourselves if there is truly, in such cases, a genesis of Authority. It seems, on the contrary, that we are dealing with the transmission of Authority, the emergence of the new Authority being conditioned by the preliminary existence of another Authority. The ‘social contract’, even in the eyes of its partisans, has not been anything other than a ‘working hypothesis’: they have never maintained that this is how Authority actually comes into being. According to this analysis, every Authority is either that of the Father, the Leader, the Master or the Judge – that is, a combination of these ‘pure’ Authorities. But we have seen that each one of the ‘pure’ Authorities is capable of engendering itself spontaneously. It is, by contrast, inconceivable that one of them is engendered (for the ‘first’ time) as a result of a ‘social contract’, or a drawing of lots or any other such act. As for the known concrete cases of conditioned ‘genesis’, none of these turned out to be a genuine genesis. On the one hand, there is generally speaking the already ‘recognised’ (that is to say, already existing) intervention of divine Authority beforehand: destiny, and so on, does nothing other than nominate God’s elected one to transmit his Authority. On the other hand, it is never a question of the birth of a new Authority: Authority itself is already here (that is to say, it is already ‘recognised’), and it is only a question of changing its material (human) ‘support’ by transferring it from one individual (or group) to another, so that here, too, it is a question of a transmission of Authority. We can therefore say that every genuine genesis of Authority is necessarily spontaneous (and there is a particular – ‘pure’ or ‘compound’ – type of genesis corresponding to each ‘pure’ or ‘compound’ Authority). As for the so-called conditioned ‘geneses’, they are nothing other than cases of transmission. And it is to the problem of such transmission of Authority that we must now turn our attention. Note 1: The birth (genesis) of an Authority must not be confused with the external signs of its ‘recognition’. It is true that authority exists only

in so far as it is ‘recognised’: the Master is Master of his Slave only in so far as the latter ‘recognises’ him as such (or ‘recognises’ himself as Slave), and so on. It is therefore possible to say that the genesis of Authority is the genesis of its ‘recognition’ by those who will be subject to it. But it is possible, precisely for this reason – because it boils down to the same thing – to say that Authority makes itself known to those who are subject to it: either there is no Authority at all, or it is ‘recognised’ by the mere fact of its existence. Authority and the ‘recognition’ of Authority are one and the same thing. It is possible, however, to distinguish between this ‘recognition’ (of Authority) itself and what could be called its manifestation. And this ‘manifestation’ is not only an ‘external sign of respect’, and so on, but also the external form of the ‘act of recognition’ itself. For example: in an assembly someone proposes a ‘project’ and is accordingly ‘elected’ Leader; it is his project that has engendered his Authority as Leader, and not his ‘election’ by the others; he does not hold Authority because he has been elected; he has been elected because he has already been granted the advantage derived from the Authority generated by his ‘project’; the election was nothing but the ‘manifestation’, the ‘external sign’ of his Authority, engendered spontaneously (that is to say, by the act of ‘recognition’ of his Authority). Generally speaking, Authority (and its ‘recognition’) arises (spontaneously) in the ‘candidate’ (who will be elected) before his election, which is nothing but a (first) manifestation of this already existing (that is to say, ‘recognised’) Authority. Similarly, the nonelection of a ‘candidate’ does nothing but make manifest his lack of Authority. Note 2: The (‘democratic’) theory of the ‘social contract’ arises from an erroneous interpretation of the fact of the existence of (political or other) elections. On the one hand, this theory does not see that, as we have just said, election ‘confirms’ rather than engenders Authority – that is to say, it simply makes it externally manifest (as is the case in every act of obedience, that is, of renunciation of ‘reacting’). On the other hand, this theory overlooks the fact that the known cases of election pertain to men and not to principles: an election transmits an already existing (that is to say, recognised) Authority from one individual (or group) to another, but it never creates an Authority that has not existed before anywhere else.

In addition, analysis of this theory shows that it has in mind a case of transmission of Authority. It assumes in fact that, in and by the act of election, Authority passes from the electorate to the elected person (or persons), the former parting with their Authority (= ‘power’) in favour of the elected. And it is only effectively in this way that this theory can be justified (by providing this corrective to it): because if there had not been any existing Authority, an election would never have been able to engender it; there would be, for that matter, no election, because there could be no one elected. (Why one rather than the other unless an Authority already exists? And if it is chance that decides, why would the ‘elected’ have Authority unless chance is a divine Authority? By contrast, if I have Authority, the person I elect has it too. See below.) But what is this Authority that is transmitted by election? Quite obviously, and by definition, one cannot have authority over oneself, the very idea of a ‘reaction’ having no meaning here at all. Also, the fact that I – an isolated individual – have ‘elected’ someone does not give the ‘elected’ any Authority over me (rather than the other way round!), unless there were an Authority (that I ‘recognised’) independent of the fact of my ‘election’. Also, we speak correctly of collective rather than individual election. But here, the notion of Authority does have a meaning – because we can distinguish, in a group, the whole from the components (of this whole) and one component from another (or from all others) and we can speak of the Authority of the whole over the components, or of one component over another (or the others), particularly of the Authority of the majority over a minority (or the minority over a majority). And election does nothing other than transmit this already existing (that is to say, recognised) Authority over the elected. The entire question, therefore, comes down to knowing whether this Authority is a sui generis Authority, distinct from the Authorities of the Father, the Leader, the Master and the Judge (and their ‘compounds’) that we have distinguished and described. But this is what the theory of the ‘social contract’ maintains (when speaking generally of the sui generis Authority that the Majority has over the Minority). We must therefore see whether this theory is accurate. (If it is accurate, our theory is wrong. If our theory is true, the Authority in question must be reducible either to one of our ‘pure’ types, or to one among their various

‘combinations’.) We have no interest in cases where one part of the group exerts over the other an Authority of the known type: whether it is collective or individual, this does not change anything either in its nature or in the mode of its genesis (a group can embody the Authority of the Leader, for example, in the same way as an individual). It is a question of knowing whether there is a sui generis Authority that pertains to part of the group inasmuch as it is a part only. But this Authority can only be founded on the quantitative value of the group. The ‘qualitative’ value is, indeed, nothing other than that of the Father, the Leader, the Master or the Judge, leading us back to the already studied cases (since we did not distinguish between cases of individual and collective Authority while speaking about these types of Authority). However, from a quantitative point of view, the part which exerts an Authority over another can either be equal to it, form the Majority, or form the Minority. If both parts are equal, there is obviously no reason for one of them to exert – qua part – an Authority over the other; if it does so, it is because there are ‘qualitative’ reasons – qualities of the Leader, the Judge, and so on. By contrast, in principle, a Majority can exert Authority over a Minority only because it is a Majority; similarly, a Minority can do the same only qua part, that is to say, by the mere fact of being a Minority. Theories of the ‘social contract’ (‘democratic’ theories) generally maintain (but not always: see Rousseau!) that there is a sui generis Authority of the Majority qua Majority; and it is possible to say that it is this sui generis Authority that is transmitted by election to the elected. In fact, however, if it is possible to speak of the Authority of the Majority, it is equally possible also to speak of the Authority of the Minority. The former certainly seems to be more obvious: cases where we (consciously and voluntarily) submit to acts of the Majority solely because it is a Majority are readily observable. And there is a well-known variant of this Authority: the Authority of ‘public opinion’, of ‘What would people say?’, the desire ‘to pass unnoticed’, to ‘do the same as everyone else’, and so on. But the opposite cases must not be overlooked either. There is what can be called the Authority of the ‘authentic’ over the ‘banal’; there is also the pejorative nuance attached to words such as ‘the masses’, ‘crowd’, ‘hoi polloi’, ‘Joe public’, and so on. There is also the universally widespread phenomenon called ‘snobbery’. The ‘snob’ is

a man who imagines himself to be ‘authentic’, ‘personal’, and so on, but who is in fact the slave of an Authority (no less than the ‘petty bourgeois’), of ‘What would people say?’; it is simply that he does not recognise any Authority other than that which he believes to be the ‘elite’ by tacitly supposing that this is by necessity only a Minority. It would therefore be tempting to say that there are cases (‘snobbery’ for instance) where the Minority exerts a sui generis Authority by dint of the mere fact of being a Minority, as there are, similarly, cases (the prud’homme7 for example) where the majority exerts an Authority qua Majority. Let us see whether in this case we are dealing with cases of sui generis Authority, or whether they can be interpreted as combinations of our ‘pure’ types. We shall first take the case of the Majority, accepting, of course, that its Authority derives solely from the fact that it is a majority. However, since Authority cannot be exercised over oneself, it makes no sense to speak of the Authority of the Majority over itself (that is to say, over its members, since by definition, the Majority is a quantity – that is to say, the sum total of its members). As for the Minority, its very existence proves that it does not recognise the Authority of the Majority, since forming a minority means precisely being opposed to the majority, and so ‘reacting’ (in one way or another) against its acts. But, where there is no Authority, ‘reactions’ can only be removed by force. Therefore, wherever the Majority claims a sui generis would-be ‘Authority’ resulting from its sheer number, it is in fact claiming pure and simple force. (A regime that is based purely and solely on a majority is a regime founded on force only. The ‘majority’ regime can therefore be contrasted with the ‘authoritarian’ one; the latter rests on Authority, while the former rests on force.) Note: Given that – if ‘qualitatively’ equal – the majority is necessarily stronger than the minority, the Minority generally speaking knows this and consciously renounces any ‘reaction’ that is a priori doomed to failure. And it is for this reason that the Majority does not generally need to deploy force or to use violence. The conscious renunciation of ‘reaction’ produces at the same time the illusion of a sui generis ‘authority’ of the Majority. But this is only an illusion, because this conscious renunciation cannot be described as voluntary. Generally speaking, the strong can

almost always prevail without effectively employing force, threat alone being generally enough to induce a renunciation of any attempt to react; but such a renunciation of ‘reaction’ has nothing to do with the recognition of an Authority. If a boxing champion tells me to leave a café, I do it without ‘reacting’, but certainly not because he has any Authority in my eyes. Therefore, there is no sui generis Authority proper to a Majority by dint of the mere fact that it is a Majority. And the same applies to the Minority. True, since the Minority is necessarily weaker (physically, that is to say quantitatively) than the Majority, its power can only derive from its Authority (minority regimes are necessarily ‘authoritarian’). But this Authority never derives from the fact that the Minority is a Minority. The ‘justification’ (‘propaganda’) is always of the kind: ‘even though we are only a minority, we …’ The Authority that is endorsed by a Minority ‘justifies’ itself or explains itself by ‘quality’ and not by quantity. (Even the ‘snob’ claims to belong to the elite and not to the minority.) This means that there is no sui generis Authority of the Minority. And analysis of concrete cases shows that the Minority always claims either the Authority of the Father, the Leader, the Master or the Judge (or of their ‘combinations’). In short, the fact of being in a majority or a minority can never by itself engender an Authority; the Authority of the Majority or the Minority is either illusory (simple force), or it belongs to one of the types mentioned above or to their ‘combinations’ (this Authority could, as a matter of fact, belong to the Minority as much as to the Majority). But the theory of the ‘social contract’ does not necessarily have the character of a ‘majority-based’ theory. We can even say: the variant that (wrongly) assumes the existence of sui generis Authority of the Majority over the Minority is nothing but a distortion of the original theory (see Rousseau), which maintains (more or less consciously) the existence of a sui generis Authority of the whole over the part. (Thus, for Rousseau, the Authority of the Whole – or of the ‘general will’ – is not necessarily expressed by a Majority; in some cases, it can even be contrary to the sum of all particular wills. See the ‘social contract’.) The existence of a ‘general will’ (opposed to private wills and their sum, independently from the question of number) is indisputable. This fact has always existed, and Rousseau’s only (enormous!) merit was to

have brought it to light. Rousseau’s ‘general will’ (what we can call the Authority of the Whole over the Parts) is what used to be called raison d’état, and so on. It is this Authority that pagan governments appealed to when they went to seek advice from the Oracle. It is also this Authority that the Church and the Pope appealed to in the middle ages, opposing it to the ‘private wills’ of the feudal lords and the kings. (It was when a king proclaimed himself ‘emperor’ and claimed to represent this ‘general will’ – besides his ‘private will’ as king – that the conflict between spiritual and secular Power started.) And it is only from the moment when the ‘general will’ ceased to have a divine character (or even an ‘ideological’ one, interpreted by the ‘spiritual’ leaders) that there came into being the idea according to which the ‘general will’ is expressed through the will of the Majority. (This erroneous idea was abandoned as soon as another ‘support’ for this ‘general will’ was found in the ‘Proletariat’ of Lenin–Stalin, the Impero of Mussolini, the Volk of Hitler, and so on.) The fact of the general will is therefore indisputable. The whole question hangs on knowing whether it is here a case of a sui generis Authority, or some combination of our types of ‘pure’ Authority. But phenomenological analysis shows that the latter is indeed the case (n.b. The question must be studied more closely). The very notion of the ‘general will’ (as well as the fact that, generally speaking, it has a tendency to assume the aspect of a divine Authority) shows that the latter claims a total Authority (and not a selective one), an Authority that is absolute (and not relative). In other words, it must integrate all forms of Authority. Let us then see whether it is something other than a combination of our four ‘pure’ types, and whether it involves them all. It is obvious that one must start by looking for elements of the Authority of the Master. Given that the Whole, in so far as it is distinct from the sum total of its Parts, is not a physical (material) reality, it cannot be a question of the risking of life in a struggle to the death. The Authority of the Whole over its Parts, therefore, can never be that of a Master over his Slaves. (This ‘ideality’ or ‘unreality’ of the Whole also accounts for the fact that the ‘general will’ has nothing to do with force, being only pure Authority.) But what, generally speaking, is the relation of the Whole to the Parts?

A mechanical Whole is nothing other than the sum total of its Parts; and far from determining the latter, it is entirely determined by them. It is only in the living organism that it is possible to oppose the Whole to its Parts and say that, in a certain sense, the Parts are ‘subject’ to the Whole and are determined by it as such. (Compare Aristotle’s notion of entelechy, which, as a matter of fact, has maintained all its value specifically in the study of biology rather than, for instance in physics or chemistry.) We cannot therefore speak of the Authority of the Whole over its Parts except in so far as society (or the State) is thought of analogous to an organism. It is therefore this analogy that must guide the phenomenological analysis of the Authority attributed to the ‘general will’. However, the (biological) idea of the Whole is called upon to account for two things: 1) heredity, that is to say, the permanence of the structure of the organism (‘the chicken before the egg’); and 2) the harmony of the diverse elements of this organism. By contrast, the causality (finality) of the Whole excludes every kind of ‘revolutionary’ modification of the organism (‘mutation’) in cases where the species (the Whole) changes as a result of a change in one (or several) of its Parts. We can therefore say that the Whole determines the parts where there is harmony and permanence, but in every (‘essential’) change there is determination of the Whole by its Parts. By translating all this into ‘authoritarian’ language, we can say that the Authority of the ‘general will’ is a combination of the Authorities of the Father and the Judge, but it is never invested with the character of the Authority of the Leader. The Leader, in effect, comes into being following a project which he proposes – that is to say, according to a change (more or less radical, and even so only as a projection) in the given reality. Thus the Authority of the Leader can only take the form of a ‘private’ will (the Part). (Even in Rousseau, reforms and innovations are carried out by the ‘Legislature’, which clearly has the character of an ‘individual’. In principle, despite this, nothing contests the fact that it is a collective individual – whether a minority or a majority. But it is certainly not the ‘Whole’ against the ‘Parts’: it is one ‘Part’ set against the Whole.) By contrast, the Authority of the Father well expresses the ‘hereditary’ aspect – the ‘permanent’ side of the causality of the Whole. We can therefore say that the Authority of the ‘general will’ is of the

‘Father’ type: it is the Authority of the (‘final’) ‘cause’ – that is to say, also that of ‘tradition’, of all that contributes to the preservation of identity with itself. But, given the fact that it is here a question of the Whole – that is to say, of several Parts – the identity in question is not a unity, but has an internal complex structure. In other words, this identity determines the harmony of its Parts. But in the human (social or political) world, this harmony cannot be anything other than Justice. The Authority of the ‘general will’ is therefore an Authority of the Father doubled with that of the Judge, the first being the ‘base’ or (‘first’) Authority. (In our list, this Authority realises therefore the type FJ.) On the other hand, all this analysis shows is that the ‘general will’ does not enjoy the benefit of any other sui generis Authority except that of the Father or the Judge. Now, if we move from the Authority of the Whole to that of the Majority, we see that the element of the Authority of the Judge necessarily disappears. The mere fact that a Minority exists proves that the Parts of the Whole are not in harmony, and this means that ‘Justice’ does not dominate this Whole. Therefore, whereas the Majority appeals to its position as majority even in its relations with the Minority, it cannot do the same with regard to the Authority of the Judge. If it does not enjoy the benefit of any other Authority, it must call upon force alone. If it seems to have an Authority qua Majority, in reality it has this Authority only as representative of the Authority of the Whole (of the ‘general will’). But qua Majority (which, by definition, does not encompass all citizens), it cannot represent the element ‘Judge’. It can therefore only appeal to the Authority of the Father. In other words, either there is no Authority of the Majority at all, or we only have a case of the Authority of the Father. In any event, there is no sui generis Authority. This analysis is indeed verified by experience. In so far as the Majority has Authority (derived from its sheer number), it appears as guardian of tradition, and so on. Its Authority is that of a ‘Senate’, of a ‘Censor’, and so on. It is also the Authority of ‘What would people say?’ All those who voluntarily and consciously propose new things also ridicule the Majority, and, further, this Majority loses its pre-eminence during ‘revolutionary’ times, when society decides it is time for a change. Let us now move on to the question of the transmission of Authority.

This transmission takes place either through heredity, election, or nomination. Let us first look at hereditary transmission. In every transmission of Authority we suppose (more or less consciously) that Authority is not linked to a determinate person (hence, by the way, the possibility of a collective Authority). Since Authority remains the same (the persons who represent it, embody and realise it, are thereby its material support, and so on), it can be replaced by another. Which means that Authority is not generated by the being of the person who possesses it, but only by his acts (or by his ‘qualities’; not by the ‘substance’ but by the ‘attributes’): if another person (or persons) were to act in the same way, they would enjoy the benefits of the same Authority. Therefore, Authority can remain identical to itself while being transmitted from one person (individual or collective) to another, provided that they all reproduce the acts that engender this Authority. However, hereditary transmission is founded on the (more or less conscious) theory according to which acts, more precisely ‘virtues’ or the possibility of such acts, are transmitted from father to son. Hence the idea that the son (or, generally speaking, a related person) inherits the Authority of the Father. To tell the truth, this theory of the transmission of Authority is based on a very ‘primitive’ or even ‘magical’ way of thinking. ‘Virtue’ (= the possibility of the act) is conceived as some sort of semi-material substance (the ‘mana’), which can be found (more or less completely) in all members of the same family and is transmitted in the fullest way from father to son (but not daughter); it decreases little by little (the younger receives less of it than the elder, and so on). (Later variants: if Authority is of divine origin, divinity is transmitted preferably to the eldest son.) As this ‘materialist’ conception of Authority came under attack (and indeed, nothing suggests that the ‘virtues’ that engender and maintain Authority are hereditary), this mode of transmission lost much of its prestige. Nowadays, we can consider it as almost nonexistent. Far back in time, however, we find examples of the application of this mode of transmission to all types of Authority (even that of the Judge). But now it seems that we want to reject it entirely. The fact is that this mode of transmission of Authority rests on an erroneous theory, and is therefore destined to disappear sooner or later. But of all the types of Authority, it is again that of the Father that is

most prone to this tendency, by its very nature, in so far as this Authority is nothing other than the Authority of tradition. Note: The Authority of the ‘constitutional’ monarch is essentially reducible to that of the Father; that is why, in its case, hereditary transmission has managed to endure to this day, without greatly shocking ‘public opinion’. But it seems impossible to give back to the Head of State the Authority of the Leader, the Judge, and thus also that of the Master by maintaining the principle of the transmission of his Authority by heredity. The same remarks apply for the hereditary ‘Senate’ – the House of Lords, for example. There remain therefore the other two modes of transmission: election and nomination. At first sight, these terms seem synonymous. We are accustomed to saying that in Athens the magistrates were elected by the Assembly of the people, whereas Cyrus the Great nominated his satraps. But we could as well have said that the Majority nominates candidates (since it designates them without consulting anyone, without its will being limited by anyone) and that the Dictator elects his collaborators (since he chooses those whom he thinks are the best). In any case, whether it is a question of one or many, whether there is a vote or not, does not constitute an essential difference (the Roman triumvirs managed, among themselves, to put a candidacy to the vote; but it was a nomination and not an election). And yet, when we speak of ‘election’ and ‘nomination’, it certainly feels as if we are using two distinct political categories. There is indeed an essential difference, and we can make this visible by defining these notions in the following way: there is transmission of Authority by nomination when the candidate for Authority is designated by the person (or persons) who already possesses an Authority, and one of the same type (a Leader nominated by a Leader, for example); there is transmission by election when the candidate is designated by a person or persons who either have no Authority or have an Authority of another type (a Judge nominated by a Leader, for example). In fact, in the second case, there genuinely is election, that is to say, a choice (of the best), since the candidate cannot derive his Authority from the person who elected him, the latter not having any himself, so the candidate has only himself to thank for it (the election does nothing other than reveal his ‘value’, that is to say, his Authority); in the first case, by contrast, the

candidate can in principle be anyone, since he derives his Authority from the person who has chosen him (the latter transmits to him his ‘connoisseurship’, in the form of guidelines, advice and education, for example). Note 1: Strictly speaking, election does not differ in essence from drawing lots. The individual or collective elector may well believe he is choosing the best. But if he has no Authority, his choice has no value for the others; it is therefore, in their view, as if the candidate were being chosen by lot; unless the elector has a ‘negative authority’, it is better to appoint judges by lot than to have them elected by thugs. It is the same for the elector who holds Authority of a type different from the one that is being transmitted: in this case he is incompetent. Therefore, direct universal suffrage – and referendum – do not differ from drawing lots. We have also seen that, in the case of the ‘democracies’ of antiquity, election by vote often came close to election by the drawing of lots. In a parliamentary regime, Parliament has inherited the Authority of the King: it therefore nominates those whom it appoints. The whole question comes down to knowing what is the nature of the Authority of Parliament. If its members are elected by direct universal suffrage, this means that they are chosen by lot: the Authority of the King has thus ceased to be transmitted by heredity and is now transmitted by drawing lots. The whole question thus consists in knowing which elements of this Authority have managed to survive this change in the mode of transmission. Generally speaking, only the Authority of the Leader remains; the other three types disappear. Note 2: In the case of nomination, the nominator can transmit part of his Authority to the nominated without having his Authority diminished: we can say that the nominated is part of his own body, both acting as ‘support’ to the Authority, which remains the same. The loss of Authority by the nominated is also considered a loss of Authority by the nominator: to make a particular mistake or to nominate someone who makes it is more or less the same thing; to nominate another person in place of the one who has made it means repeating oneself again. But the nominator can also transmit all his Authority to the nominated – as in nominating one’s successor. Note 3: If hereditary transmission presupposes an erroneous theory, then transmission by election, that is to say by drawing lots, is clearly

unsatisfactory as well (unless we call upon divine Authority, the draw or election simply revealing God’s nomination). Nomination thus remains as the only mode of acceptable transmission. But it is obvious that the spontaneous genesis of Authority must always be preferable to any form of transmission: the best thing would be to recognise the Authority of the candidate who imposes himself, when it is a case of replacing one representative of an Authority by another. Let us remind ourselves that these so-called elections are generally only external manifestations of this spontaneous genesis. The main thing is to organise the electoral regime in such a way that it does not hinder these geneses. By its very essence, Authority implies a spontaneous generation. Any form of transmission of Authority always diminishes it to a certain extent. But if we consider the four pure types separately, we see that it is the Authority of the Judge that least lends itself to transmission. In order to have the true Authority of the Judge, its representative must always have enjoyed the benefit of a spontaneous Authority founded on his personal ‘justice’ (‘equity’, ‘honesty’). Note: The random choice of jurors is a kind of spontaneous genesis of the Authority of the Judge: chosen at random, the jury is supposed to be impartial, that is to say, to realise the ‘virtue’ of justice which is the foundation of the Authority of the Judge. Also, its Authority applies only to the case for which it has been chosen – that is to say, to the case in which it is supposed to be ‘just’. As for the transmitted Authority of the Father, we have already seen that it is best suited to transmission by heredity. (Nomination comes next, that is to say, the designation by a holder of the same Authority of the Father, and in last place election, that is to say, the drawing of lots.) The Authority of the Master, in so far as it can be transmitted, seems best suited to election (that is to say, to random allocation), seeing that, in the case of the spontaneous genesis of the Authority of the Victor, chance already plays some role. Note: It is perhaps for this reason that ‘tyrants’ tend to have their Authority confirmed by referendums. Hereditary transmission is by contrast absolutely contrary to this type of Authority (founded on personal ‘Risk’), and hereditary mastery has always been founded on Force and not on Authority. Finally, the Authority of the Leader, in so far as it has to be transmitted, is best

suited to nomination (understood as nomination by the person who possesses the Authority of the Leader): since the Leader is supposed to predict the future (succeed in his projects), he is supposed to know in advance the behaviour of the person he nominates, in such a way that nomination by a recognised Leader can, in principle, even transmit an Authority other than that of the Leader. In other words, in so far as there is no spontaneous genesis of Authority, the existent Authority always has a tendency to be transmitted by way of nomination by a Leader. But all these questions will have to be studied more closely. General Note: All four types (and their ‘combinations’) can be realised in different ‘spheres’: political, religious, and so on. (There is a religious ‘sphere’ wherever there are (supposed) relations with a ‘beyond’; a political ‘sphere’ wherever there is a State (see brief article on the State8). We have to see whether all types (and ‘combinations’) can be realised in all ‘spheres’.

II. METAPHYSICAL ANALYSIS

Let us now move on to the metaphysical analysis of the phenomenon of Authority; this analysis can only be sketched out here. There is no doubt that Authority is an essentially human (non-natural) phenomenon – which means (without our being able to demonstrate this here) it is social and historical: Authority presupposes a society (or the State in a broad sense,9 that is to say something other than an animal horde where ‘reaction’ is not possible). In addition, society presupposes (and implies) history (and not just a biological and natural evolution). In other words, Authority can ‘manifest’ itself (become a ‘phenomenon’) only in a World with a temporal structure. The metaphysical foundation of Authority is therefore a ‘modification’ of the entity ‘Time’ (to be understood as ‘human’ or ‘historic’ Time with the rhythm: Future, Past, Present, as opposed to ‘natural’ Time, with the predominance of the Present in the ‘physical’ sphere, or the Past in the ‘biological’ sphere). Since there is the primacy of the Future, there is also (as we shall see) the primacy of the Authority of the Leader. Authority par excellence is that of the (political, religious, and so on) ‘revolutionary’ Leader with a universal ‘project’ (Stalin). There is no Authority in the Eternal as such. And if, as we shall see, a type of Authority is metaphysically founded on Eternity, it is only in its relations with time that the Eternal ‘manifests itself’ in the guise of Authority. There is no doubt that Time therefore has the value of an Authority. And, curiously enough – and this may also seem at first sight paradoxical – it has this in all its three modes. First of all, the Past. A Past is always ‘venerable’; tampering with it is ‘sacrilegious’; to neglect it is ‘inhuman’. The Authority of an institution has always been ‘justified’ (explained) by its antiquity (especially in pagan Antiquity). Similarly, the seniority of a family, of a State, has always been not only a title of glory, but also a very real foundation of Authority. But there is, on the other hand, an equally indisputable Authority, that of the Future. The ‘man of the future’ has an Authority from the mere fact of having ‘everything before him’. It is from the Future they embody that the ‘young’ derive their Authority, which, at times, can be

considerable. We recognise voluntarily the Authority of the ‘man of tomorrow’. And one can also claim for one’s own self millennia to come (see Hitler) as well as past millennia (see Mussolini). Finally, the Present itself has an Authority as Present. We want to be up to date,10 we do not want to be ‘behind the times’. The enormous – and ‘tyrannical’ – Authority of ‘fashion’ is an Authority of the Present, of the ‘actual’. The Authority of the ‘man of the moment’ pertains to the fact that it is he, par excellence, who represents ‘actuality’, the Present, the ‘real presence’ of something in the world (Hegel’s Gegenwart), as opposed to the ‘poetic’ unreality of the past and the ‘utopian’ unreality of the future. On the other hand, all these ‘temporal’ Authorities are set against the authority of Eternity. We often claim to adhere to ‘eternal principles’, and their Authority pertains to the fact that they are outside the three modes of Time. It is from Eternity that the representatives of God on earth derive their Authority. But it is obvious that, if the Eternal has an Authority, it is only by opposition to the ‘temporal’, that is to say, in relation to the latter. Eternity (we say this without demonstrating it) is nothing but the negation of Time, that is to say it depends on it. And the Authority of the Eternal is confirmed as such by relating itself (negatively) to the Authorities of either the Present, the Past or the Future. There is thus an Authority of Eternity, as there is an Authority of Time in its three modes. The main question lies in knowing whether this is a case of a sui generis Authority, or a direct ‘manifestation’ of the metaphysical foundations of the four ‘pure’ types of Authority that we have already studied. One indication suggests this second hypothesis: we have distinguished four pure types of Authority, and the Authority we are now considering is necessarily divided into four types: Authority of the Eternal and Authority of the Temporal. The latter is made of the Authority of the Present, of the Past, and of the Future. It is therefore natural to suppose that we have here two complementary aspects of one and the same Authority having the same quadruple structure. Certainly, this is just one piece of evidence, but it is also confirmed by another. If we consider our four ‘pure’ types, we see that they can be naturally organised into two groups: the Authority of the Judge as

against the Authorities of the Father, the Leader and the Master, which form a bloc. And this suggests to us the idea of seeing the Authority of the Judge as closer to the Eternal, as against the three temporal Authorities that together form a bloc as temporal, and that in turn we can connect with the three other types of ‘pure’ Authority. Analysis confirms this supposition. On the one hand, and as we have already seen, the Authority of the Judge does not lend itself, so to speak, to any form of transmission, whereas the other three are transmitted in one way or another, particularly via heredity. (While we often see that the sons inherit the Authority of the Father, the Master or the Leader simply because they are sons of those who used to possess these Authorities, it has never been observed that someone inherits by simple filiation the Authority of the Judge as judge.) We can therefore say that the Authority of the Judge is resistant to any form of ‘succession’, that is to say, any forms of ‘temporalization’, since it is in some sense outside Time: it is deemed to exist always, and if it cannot do so, it disappears completely (to come into being spontaneously once again), instead of ‘passing’ (without discontinuity) over to something posterior. The three other Authorities, in contrast, seem to ‘persist’ in Time, and their ‘transmission’ does nothing other than manifest their temporal essence. On the other hand, the Authority of the Judge, in a way, sets itself against the three others, which still form a bloc in this opposition. In fact, the Judge can, in principle, ‘judge’ the Father, the Master and the Leader, but the nature of the Authority of the Judge is such that it should in theory be subtracted from the action arising from the Authority of the three other types. Finally, just as Eternity has an ‘authoritarian’ character only in and through its relations with time, the judge has no true Authority except in so far as he sets himself (if need arises) against the three other Authorities. (If the Fathers, the Leaders and Masters were by definition or in ‘essence’ ‘just’, there would be no distinct Authority of the Judge; and if the Judge were not able to set his ‘justice’ against the wills of the Fathers, Leaders and Masters, he would have no ‘authority’.) Everything therefore leads us to suppose that the Authority of the Judge is nothing other than a ‘variant’ of the Authority of the Eternal, that is to say, of the ‘authoritarian manifestation’ of Eternity in its relations with Time. And a direct analysis (which can only be outlined here) confirms this supposition.

The Eternal has no Authority strictly speaking except in relation to human actions in so far as it cancels some of them, namely those that have the character of ‘reactions’ against the active intervention of the element of Eternity. It is therefore not Eternity as such, but the actions endowed with an eternal character, that have Authority. But an action is ‘eternal’ either when it is ‘outside’ time (that is to say, independent of conditions created by the Past, the Present or the Future), or when it is ‘at all times’ (that is to say, in the Present, the Past and the Future). But this is precisely what characterises the ‘just’ action: it is outside Time because this action (the ‘just’ judgement, for example) is dependent neither on the ‘interests’ of the day, nor on ‘preconceived opinion’ dictated by the past, nor, finally, on ‘desires’ anchored in the Future; and it is ‘at all times’ since, being just, it remains so ‘eternally’ and can indefinitely (qua ‘judgement’) turn its attention to the Present as much as to the Past or the Future. Just as Eternity, being the negation of the particular modes of Time, can be considered as the totality or the integration of the latter, so the Authority of the Judge (‘justice’) can be interpreted as the ‘integration’ of the three others – the latter being unable to form a harmonious unity, not even one that is stable or ‘eternal’, except on condition of subordinating themselves en bloc to the Authority of the Judge or to that of ‘Justice’. We can therefore say that if Eternity only ‘manifests’ itself in the guise of an Authority in so far as it is realised in the world qua Justice, the Authority of the Judge, for its part, can find its metaphysical foundation only in the ‘penetration’ of Eternity in Time, this ‘penetration’ having for ‘effect’ the ‘duration’ as well as the ‘unity’ of the latter. Eternity, in its relation with Time, is therefore indeed the metaphysical basis of the Authority of the Judge. As for the other three ‘pure’ types of Authority, they have as their metaphysical basis (‘human’) Time. In fact, the ‘temporal’ character of these Authorities is beyond doubt. It only remains to know how they are divided among the other three modes of Time. We have seen that the Authority of the Father lends itself best to hereditary transmission, while those of the Leader and the Master respectively favour transmission by nomination and by election (or even random allocation). But it is obvious that heredity operates under the domination of the idea of the Past. Nomination seems, by contrast, to

appeal to the Future (to the future behaviour of the nominated). As for election (= ‘lots’), it is the simple fact of the election (= drawing of lots) that matters – that is to say, an act essentially belonging to the Present. And this leads us to suppose that if the Authority of the Father is a ‘manifestation’ of the Past, the Leader and the Master respectively ‘manifest’ the authorities of the Future and the Past.11 Direct analysis (only outlined here) confirms this supposition. Let us first take the Past. It is not the Past as such that has Authority: nature is more ancient than man; the age of a stone can be highly ‘venerable’; there is, nevertheless, no Authority in these cases. The Past which exerts an Authority over me is a historic Past; it is my Past, that is to say the Past that is the ‘cause’ of my Present and the ‘basis’ of my Future; it is the Past that is held to determine the Present with the Future in mind. In other words, the Past does not acquire an Authority except in so far as it presents itself in the guise of a tradition. We can therefore say that Time – in the mode of the Past – ‘manifests’ itself in the guise of the Authority of the Father, and that the latter has its metaphysical foundation in the ‘presence’ of the Past in the Present – that is to say, in every reality that is part of the temporal world. Let us now move on to the Future. Here, again, the Future, pure and simple, has no Authority; everything has a future ahead of it, and this in no way increases its prestige. The Future exerts an Authority only in so far as it is my future, the historic future, which determines the Present (or is assumed to determine it), while maintaining its links with the Past. In other words, the Future exerts an Authority only in so far as it ‘manifests’ itself in the guise of a project (conceived in the present with the future in mind, and based on knowledge about the past). But the Authority of the ‘project’ is nothing other than that of the Leader. We can therefore say that the Future ‘manifests’ itself in ‘authoritarian’ form qua the Authority of the Leader, which has as its metaphysical basis the virtual ‘presence’ of the Future in all that is a (human, that is to say, historic) Present – that is to say, a temporal (to be understood as historic) reality. Finally, let us look at the Present. Given that all that exists (in the temporal world) is ‘present’, the Present as such cannot have any Authority: the person ‘subject’ to Authority can claim adherence to the Present pure and simple in the same way as the one who ‘exerts’ this

Authority. It is the historic Present (the ‘historic moment’) that has an unquestionable Authority, and not the ‘present’ (the t = 0) of Physics. It is the entity having a real presence in the mass of things that are simply ‘present’ (that is to say, existent) that has Authority: the ‘real presence’ of the Spirit in ‘Matter’, of that which does not exist (in the strong sense of the term) in all that represents effective existence. But the nonexistent in the temporal world is either that which no longer exists, or that which does not exist yet: it is the Past or the Future. We notice therefore a ‘real presence’ of the Past and the Future in the Present, which has Authority: it is a Present that arises from the Past and is expecting the Future. But such a (human or ‘historic’) Present is nothing other than action in the strong sense of the term, the action that realises in the present the memory of the past as well as the project of the future. Action, however, sets itself against being. And this opposition is realised and ‘manifests’ itself in and by (or if you prefer, as) the transformation of being through action, which is basically an active destruction of being. But the ‘Risk’ that generates the Authority of the Master is precisely this very action in the strict sense of the word, which sets itself against its being (its life), places this in peril and can, if necessary, annihilate it completely. And all activity of the Master (founded on this ‘Risk’) is a realisation and ‘manifestation’ of the Past and the Future in the Present, an Action in the proper sense of the term. Action, however, is indeed a ‘manifestation’ of time in the Present world. We can therefore say that it is the Present (of the historic world) that is the metaphysical basis of the Authority of the Master, and that the Present does not ‘manifest’ itself in its ‘authoritarian’ form except in so far as it realises itself qua action strictly speaking – action that would not stop even when faced with the Risk of the total destruction of the being that supports it. (The Authority of the ‘need of the day’ that sets itself against that of the ‘dream of the future’ and the ‘preservation of the past’ is ultimately the Authority of the necessities of war or, generally speaking, the vital risks which are entailed in the penetration of the Past of a Nation into its Future through its Present.) The Authority of the Master is therefore not only that of the Warrior. Generally speaking, it is the Authority of the person who (in all spheres) is ‘ready to run the Risk’, who ‘knows how to act’ and is ‘capable of taking a decision (project)’, who ‘gets down to business’, and so on; in

short, a person who is not, nevertheless, always ‘reasonable’ and ‘careful’. Time – in relation with Eternity – is realised in the temporal World through the ‘causal’ structure of the latter. Without going into details, let us just point out that, if Eternity is realised by a ‘formal cause’, Time realises the Past qua ‘material cause’, the Future qua ‘final cause’ and the Present qua ‘efficient cause’ (see Aristotle). But on the level of human existence (that is to say, in the temporal historic world), the ‘formal cause’ ‘manifests’ itself by ‘contemplation’, that is to say, in general, by ‘passive’, ‘theoretical’, ‘disinterested’ and ‘quietist’ behaviour. The three other ‘causes’, by contrast, ‘manifest’ themselves on this level through the modes of ‘practical’ or ‘active’, ‘voluntary’ or ‘interested’ behaviour. The ‘efficient cause’ ‘manifests itself’ through ‘action’ in the proper sense of the word, action carried out in the Present; the ‘final cause’ does so through the Project, that is to say action projected into the Future; and the ‘material cause’ through ‘existential memory’ or the ‘tradition’, carried out so to speak by inertia, similar to the ‘passage’ of being from Cause into its Effect. It is easy to see that the ‘authoritarian’ aspects of these manifestations are nothing other than the ‘phenomena’ of Authority, on the one hand, those of the Father, the Master and the Leader (which are all acting in one way or another), and, on the other hand, that of the Judge (who does not act but contents himself with ‘contemplating’ – or ‘judging’ the acts of others). Thus the ‘causal’ structure of the historic World (which derives from its ‘temporal’ structure) also serves as the metaphysical basis for the quadruple phenomenon of Authority, ‘justifying’ or explaining this phenomenon as a whole, in its internal structure (division into 1 + 3) and in the mutual relations of its four constitutive elements. In this manner, the metaphysical analysis ‘justifies’ the phenomenological analysis in the sense that it explains why there are necessarily four irreducible types of Authority and four only. It proves that our list of sixty-four ‘variants’ is truly exhaustive. It also allows us to control and rectify the analytic description of each ‘pure’ type (and of each ‘variant’) and that of the links that connect them to one another. Consequently, it allows us to complete and ‘justify’ the political, moral and psychological consequences that can be deduced from phenomenological analysis of the phenomenon of Authority.

In order to be able to do this, we should have pursued the metaphysical analysis more deeply, completing it with an in-depth ontological analysis. It is, however, out of the question to undertake this kind of work here. We have to content ourselves with the brief outline proposed earlier and with the few remarks on ontological analysis that follow.

III. ONTOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

The metaphysical analysis (Time – Causes) has only been outlined. As for the ontological analysis, we shall have to postpone it completely until later. We shall content ourselves with making a few brief historical observations relative to this problem. The ontological analysis has to reveal the very structure of Being, taken as Being, a structure that corresponds to the quadruple ‘phenomenon’ of Authority, which ‘manifests’ (on the level of human existence) the metaphysical ‘existences’ of Eternity and Time in their three fundamental ‘modes’ (as well as their ‘realisations’ in the guise of ‘causes’). We have to say, however, that none of the four theories of Authority implies a deep and accurate ontological analysis. To be sure, all these theories rise to the ontological level (starting from the phenomenological level and via the metaphysical one). But precisely because each of these theories was conceived as a universal theory, recognising only one type of Authority and mistaking it for Authority itself tout court, their ontological analyses could only be incomplete and erroneous. (More precisely, it is the inaccuracies of the ontologies of the authors of these theories that led them to undertake incomplete phenomenological analyses, not seeing in the complex phenomenon of Authority anything other than the aspect which corresponded to their unilateral conception of Being.) Scholastic speculation over God (causa sui, essence that implies existence, Trinitarian structure, ‘incarnation’) is in reality an ontological theory. But we can say that this theory reveals only one aspect of Being, mistakenly taking this for the Whole and distorting it by doing so. As for the problem of Authority, scholastic ontology can provide material only for the ontological analysis of the Authority of the Father. Similar remarks apply for the other three ontologies: Plato’s ontology (the One-Agathon, the One-and-the multiple, the dualist structure of Being, and so on) could be the starting point of ontological analysis of the Authority of the Judge. Aristotle’s ontology, by contrast (the immobile Motor, the Nous, Form and Matter, and so on), leads to analysis of the Authority of the Leader. Finally, Hegel’s ontology

(Negativity, Totality, the dialectical structure of Being, and so on) can serve as the basis for ontological analysis of the Authority of the Master. All these ontologies would have to be modified (completed and revised) precisely because they describe the particular aspects of Being they reveal as if it were integral Being itself that was at issue. Thus the ontological analysis of the complete (that is to say, quadruple) phenomenon of Authority can allow us to elaborate a complete ontology, and no longer a fragmentary one, as was the case with all those that have been proposed so far. Of course, we can study the structure of Being qua Being starting from the analysis of any phenomenon (since every phenomenon ‘manifests’ Being that ‘exists’ qua World). But the phenomenon of Authority being so complex, it is better to study ontology by taking other starting points and proceeding from there to the ontological analysis of Authority after having elaborated the broad outlines of ontology. However, each different phenomenon seems to ‘manifest’ certain aspects of Being better than others. Also, a phenomenon as important as that of Authority must not be neglected in ontological studies. In fact, the work must be carried out in a perpetual to-and-fro: descent from ontology (assumed to be definitive) to the phenomenon; then ascent from phenomenology (assumed to be definitive) towards Being qua Being. This is the only way we can hope to arrive one day at phenomenologies, metaphysics, and ontologies – that is to say, a philosophy – that is truly definitive, in other words true in an absolute manner. Contenting ourselves with indicating this programme of ontological work, let us now move on to the deductions that can be made, starting from our brief phenomenological analysis and from our outline of a metaphysical analysis. 1 [Kojève is referring to his preliminary study which would later become his Outline of a Phenomenology of Right.]

2 [English word used in the original text.] 3 [With the subtitle ‘A Translation with Commentary of Section A of Chapter IV of the Phenomenology of Spirit, entitled: “Autonomy and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Mastery and Slavery” ’. First published in Mesures 5: I (15 January 1939), p. 108. Reproduced in the opening

chapter of Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, Paris: Gallimard, 1968 [1947]. English translation:

Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr., New York: Basic Books, 1969, pp. 3–30.]

4 [The ellipsis appeared in the French original without editorial explanation. Presumably, it indicates an illegible word in the manuscript.] 5 [English in the original text.] 6 [English in the original text.] 7 [Member of an elected industrial tribunal.] 8 [This could be a reference, albeit very allusive, to some arguments developed in the Outline of a

Phenomenology of Right. See also ‘Tyranny and Wisdom’, in Leo Strauss, De la tyrannie, Paris: Gallimard, 1954. English translation: Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth, ed., On Tyranny, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.]

9 The State (= ‘society’) can be political, religious (in a supposed relation with a ‘beyond’), etc. The religious State is called ‘Church’. Here we are talking about the political State only. 10 [English in the original text.] 11 [This should likely read ‘present’, not ‘past’; possibly an error.]

B. Deductions

Since our analyses are inadequate, our deductions can only be incomplete and should be read with caution. Furthermore, we shall not try to draw all the consequences that are already possible, nor even the most important ones among them. We shall content ourselves with indicating somewhat randomly a few selected consequences. We shall start with the political consequences (the State in itself). We shall then move on to ethical consequences (the individual citizen and the State in their mutual relations), to conclude with psychological consequences (the individual citizen in himself), the three stages of the development of the deductions thus corresponding, in the opposite direction, to the three stages of the analyses. Note: All our deductions are carried out in the political ‘sphere’, and so it is an (‘authoritarian’) political ethics and psychology that we are talking about. It would be interesting to make similar deductions in other ‘spheres’ where Authority appears – such as the religious or the other ‘spheres’.

I. POLITICAL APPLICATIONS

Of all the political consequences (in the narrow sense of the word) that can be drawn from our analyses, we shall single out only those that pertain to questions of the Division of Powers (1) and the Transmission of Power (2), making do, moreover, with very brief presentations. Political ‘Power’ is the power of the State, which the latter exercises through the agency of the person or persons who represent or embody it. Without a State (in the broadest sense of the term), there is no political Power (in the literal sense of the term). Even in so-called ‘democratic’ States, where Power seems to belong to the ‘mass’, it is in reality the State that possesses and exercises power: it is simply that, in this case, the State is embodied in or represented by the ‘citizens’ as a whole; but even here, individuals possess political Power only in so far as they are citizens, that is to say, in so far as they (collectively) represent or embody the State, and not qua ‘private persons’ (for instance, children have no political Power). With regard to this specific point, the Power of the citizens of a ‘democratic’ State does not differ in essence from that of an oligarchy, or even that of an ‘absolute’ monarch or a ‘tyrant’, ‘dictator’, and so on. (See brief article on the state.)1 As a matter of fact, political Power can be founded on force. But in principle it should be able to do without it: only in this case would the existence of the State not be considered ‘accidental’, and the State thereby enabled to last indefinitely. A theory (as opposed to practice) of the State thus avoids the notion of ‘force’. But in fact, a Power that is not founded on force can only be founded on Authority. Note: A Power founded on Authority can, of course, use force; but if Authority engenders force, the latter can never, by definition, engender a political Authority. A theory of ‘political Power’ is therefore nothing other than a theory of Authority (that manifests itself in the political ‘sphere’) – more precisely, a (theoretical) application of the theory of Authority to Politics (that is to say, to the State). Also, in order to avoid any ambiguity, we shall replace the phrase ‘political Power’ with that of ‘political Authority’. By definition, every political Authority belongs en bloc to the State as such. But the State is a ‘conceptual’ entity that needs a (material)

‘concrete support’ in order to exist in the spatiotemporal world. This is how problems of the division and transmission of Authority emerge. The ‘support’ of the State is at the same time the ‘support’ of the political Authority through which it is ‘maintained’ and ‘exercised’, and it is in and by this support that Authority is real (active). This real political Authority is either autonomous or dependent. In the first case, it is the (individual or collective) Authority of the Head of State; in the second case, it is the Authority of the (individual or collective) Civil Servant (fonctionnaire), who exerts his Authority as a function of that of the Leader. But, if the lifespan of the Authority of the State is, in principle, unlimited, that of its ‘support’ is necessarily finite. Authority must therefore be transmitted from one ‘support’ to another: this is the problem, strictly speaking, of the Transmission of political Authority (2, a). There is also, however, the problem related to the transmission of the Authority of the Leader to the Civil Servant; this transmission determines the nature of the Authority, which depends on the latter and on its relation with autonomous Authority (2, b). The Authority of the State is one, since the State is one. By contrast, the ‘support’ can be either individual or collective. Hence the problem of the distribution of Authority between the constitutive elements of the ‘support’, as well as the question of knowing whether the latter should be multiple (collective) or not (1, b). But if the Authority of the State is always one, it is not necessarily simple: it would only be so when it belonged to one ‘pure’ ‘type’ of Authority. And so if the Authority of the State combines several ‘pure’ types (or even all four), it is possible to ask whether all these constitutive elements must have one and the same ‘support’, or whether it is better to ‘realise’ the elements separately (perhaps by grouping some of them). This is strictly speaking the problem of the division of Authority (of the ‘Separation of powers’). It is with this question that we shall start.

1. The division of Authority a) We cannot undertake here a historical study of political Authority. We shall content ourselves with a brief analysis of the current situation.

Note: It seems that there were, in the course of history, political Authorities, that is to say, States, that realised only one type of ‘pure’ Authority. Violent conflicts between the Authority of the family, of the ‘Father’ type, and that of the State, which are well dramatised in the major Greek tragedies, seem to show that there were initially two opposed types of States: the family-State and the Clan-state, with the F ⇨ (J, L) or F ⇨ (L, J) types of Authority, and the State in the more modern sense of the term, with the M ⇨ (L, J), or M ⇨ (J, L), L ⇨ (J, M), or even L ⇨ (M, J) types. It is possible that the distinction the Greeks used to make between the regime of ‘tyranny’ and the regime of ‘liberty’ – a distinction that we find difficult to define and understand – was nothing other than an opposition between the M ⇨ and L ⇨ types. But we cannot linger over those questions. For medieval theory (which, in fact, was never fully realised), every Authority came from divine Authority. The Head of State, for example, was nothing but a Civil Servant of God. But divine Authority integrates all four ‘pure’ types of Authority, God being at the same time Father, Leader, Master and Judge. And he transmits all these elements to his Civil Servant. Furthermore, being himself one single person, God transmits his Authority to one single Civil Servant, who as such combines in himself all four types of Authority. (The ‘first’ Civil Servant is nominated by God; his Authority, thus engendered, is subsequently transmitted by heredity; as for the Authority of the Civil Servants of this ‘first’ Civil Servant of God, it is engendered and transmitted by their nomination by the latter.) However, this theory was made more complex by the fact that God nominated two Civil Servants: one of these was by necessity individual (the Pope of the Church that is in principle universal), and the other sometimes individual (the Emperor of the Empire, in principle universal) and at other times collective (national Kings, and so on). Even if the vacillations due to this last complication are ignored, it must be said that scholastic theory never managed to define clearly and unequivocally the relations between these two Civil Servants and the nature of their Authorities. In other words, the Middle Ages did not know how (or did not want) to distinguish unequivocally between the religious ‘sphere’ and the political ‘sphere’. These difficulties were eliminated by the theory that removed the ecclesiastic Civil Servant: the theory of Absolutism. The problem of the origin of

political Authority is here left unclear; but it is unequivocally asserted that it combines all four types of Authority and that it is realised in one single person (the Monarch). Then came the ‘constitutional’ theories asserting that political Authority must be shared between several independent ‘supports’. This is how the principle (and the problem) of the ‘division of powers’ (popularised by Montesquieu), which forms the basis of modern ‘democracies’ (and was violently criticised by Rousseau!), emerged. Let us briefly discuss this theory, which has dominated political thinking until very recent times. We can first note that this theory distinguishes only three types of ‘Power’. Judicial power, obviously, corresponds to the Authority of the Judge. Legislative power is nothing other than the Authority of the Leader, since it is here a question of ‘initiative’, of a ‘project’, of decisions taken in preparation for the future. As for executive Power, it corresponds to the Authority of the Master: exercised in the present, being ‘action’ par excellence, it requires on the part of its representative a total ‘abnegation’, the subordination of all, and of life itself, to the State – that is to say, to something that is essentially non-biological. In other words, this theory eliminates from political Authority – automatically and without any discussion – the fourth constitutive element, that is to say, the Authority of the Father. It is thus an amputation of the Authority that the scholastic and absolutist theories had in mind. And one is tempted to say that political Authority decays or falls apart (‘splits up’) precisely because of this amputation. Everything here is significant: that there was an amputation, that the amputated limb was precisely the Authority of the Father, and that this amputation was carried out tacitly, that is to say, unconsciously. The Authority of the Father means ‘tradition’, determination by the past, ‘real presence’ of the Past in the Present. Therefore, the suppression of the Authority of the Father has a character that is unequivocally ‘revolutionary’: the ‘constitutional’ theory is born out of the spirit of revolt and revolution, and it generates the (‘bourgeois’) revolution in as much as it is realised. Note: This theory, and the Revolution it presupposes, implies and engenders, are ‘bourgeois’: the Bourgeois wants to forget his ‘lowly’ origins as a ‘commoner’, he – unconsciously – disowns his ‘shameful’

past; hence the unconsciousness of the abolition of the Authority of the Father. In so far as the Bourgeois is proud of his past and takes it as his role model, he is not a revolutionary. He becomes one only in and by his opposition to the noble. But, by this very opposition, he recognises the exclusive value of nobility, since he no longer sees any possibility of coexisting with it. And he sees in it a value, since he wants to take the place of the noble. He thus unconsciously negates the bourgeois value, that is to say, his bourgeois past, which in his own eyes is nothing more than the past of a ‘commoner’. It is only then that he becomes ‘constitutional’, that is to say, that he stands for the separation of Powers, which from then on are for him only three: and by so doing he becomes, or is, revolutionary. But the Present deprived of the Past is human, that is to say, historical or political, only in so far as it implies the Future (otherwise, it is the Present of brutes). The Future, however, is represented by the Authority of the Leader, by the Authority which belongs to ‘projects’ that essentially surpass the given and are not just its simple consequences, already virtually present in it. Political Authority amputated of its ‘Father’ limb necessarily becomes, therefore, in so far as it remains political, primarily an Authority of the Leader (of the L ⇨ (M, J) or L ⇨ (J, M) type). It is thus that the ‘constitutional’ theory, in and by its ‘bourgeois’ revolutionary realisation, necessarily terminates in the ‘Dictatorship’ of a Napoleon or a Hitler. But since the Present, deprived of a Past, must necessarily imply the Future so that it can be human, or even political, the Leader–Dictator must always represent a ‘revolutionary project’ in the process of being implemented. Thus, the logical culmination of the ‘constitutional’ theory of a Montesquieu is the theory of ‘permanent revolution’ of a Trotsky. Note on the events of 1848 (France): The ‘bourgeois’ era can be symbolically situated between 1789 and 1940. The years 1789 and 1848 were those of the ‘bourgeois revolution’, 1848 and 1940 those of ‘bourgeois domination’. In the ‘revolutionary’ era, the Bourgeoisie is turned against the Past and towards the Future. Also, by relying on the Future, it managed to transcend the Present, which is also on the side of the Past: while disowning the immediate Past of the ancien régime, it managed – or could and should have managed – to accept codetermination by the historic past. But in ’48, the Future becomes the

demand of another ‘class’: more precisely, the Future intervenes in the Present in the guise of a ‘revolutionary project’ other than that of ’89. The Bourgeoisie, created as a political Authority by the ‘project’ of ’89, does not accept the ‘project’ of ’48 and fights against it. It is therefore turned from this fateful date onward not only against the Past, but also against the Future: it encloses itself in the Present. It is only in this way that it is really Present: it is only after ’48 that it is truly what it is – itself alone, in opposition to all that is different from it; the ‘bourgeois spirit’ was born in ’48. At the same time, by the negation of the Future, any kind of link with the Past is broken. Only the Present being real, the Bourgeoisie realises itself as such: this is the era of its domination. But a Present with neither a Future nor a Past is nothing but a ‘natural’ Present, non-human, non-historical, non-political. The domination of the Bourgeoisie is therefore simply the progressive disappearance of political reality as such – that is to say, of the Power or the Authority of the State: life is dominated by its animal aspect, by concerns related to food and sexuality. The human element still perseveres in so far as there is a remainder of transcendence of the Present either by the Past or the Future; but the Past and the Future implied in the Present no longer have an active value; they are no longer ‘active’ in the present: it is their ‘virtual’, ‘conceptual’ or ‘ideal’ presence – that is to say, a purely ‘aesthetic’ or ‘artistic’ one – that remains. Tradition vegetating in the guise of ‘Romanticism’, and the Revolution of ‘futurism’; the ‘classicist’ Present, being deprived of its proper element, which is effective action, is deprived of any life. There is therefore no such thing as a bourgeois ‘Classicism’. Note on Tradition: Every tradition strictly speaking – that is to say, one whose value and reality are political – is necessarily oral or spectacular, that is to say direct. The Written is, by its nature, detached from its material medium – from its author who fixes it in time. The Past that is presented only in writing is not, for me, my past: I very easily ‘dissociate’ myself from it; displayed in a book, my country’s past is not markedly different from the past of China, for example; I have a tendency to put all writings on the same level and to discuss theories that are displayed in them as if they were conceived outside time. Therefore, the events of ’48, by destroying the political link with the Past, had primarily to affect oral tradition: it is this tradition that had to disappear in the era of

bourgeois domination. We can also say that the Authority of the Father is anchored in the Village, while the Town tends not to ‘recognise’ it – that is to say, tends to destroy it. The Village lives duration while the Town passes time. But duration – that is to say, the totality of time and not just its ‘instant’ – necessarily implies the past: it is in and through the Past that the fleeting ‘instant’ endures and exists. The passage, the flux of time, by contrast, is provoked by the pressure of the Future: it is in statu nascendi that the Present is ‘active’, ‘virulent’, and ‘actual’. Thus, the Town tends to forget the Past while thinking of the Future, which ‘actualises’ the instantaneous Present, while the Village lives the duration of the Present by projecting it onto the Past (the return of the seasons, and so on). In other words, the Village has a natural tendency to recognise the Authority of the Father, while the Town willingly recognises the Authority of the Leader, who excludes the element ‘Father’ and opposes himself to it. The amputated (and subsequently divided) ‘constitutional’ theory of ‘Power’ as well as its political realisation, therefore, implies and presupposes the hegemony of the Town over the Village: it is a theory, a reality that is essentially urban. Note: It therefore seems that the events of ’89 should have inaugurated, and those of ’48 sanctioned, the political destruction of the Village. But I have to admit that this conclusion of our analyses does not tally at all well with historical reality. And yet the deduction seems to be accurate. This whole question must be studied more closely. The question arises as to what comes of the amputated political Authority, that is to say, the one deprived of the element ‘Father’. If the Authority of the Father is preserved only by being projected beyond political Authority, it comes to be fixed in the Family. This ‘authoritarian’ Family will be by definition opposed to the State (without the Authority of the Father). We thus fall once again into the case of the ancient (pagan) conflict between the Family and the State (see Sophocles’ Antigone), which, being essential, must lead sooner or later to the destruction of one of the opponents. Note: In fact, it is the Family that is forced to yield. And the ‘phenomenological’ as well as ‘metaphysical’ reasons for this could be explained. If, by contrast, the Authority of the Father disappears completely, the

State no longer needing to be bothered with it (as is more or less the case in both ‘constitutional’ theory and reality), three possibilities are presented, each with two variants: L ⇨ (M, J) or (J, M) M ⇨ (L, J) or (J, L) J ⇨ (M, L) or (L, M) – not to mention cases where political Authority has again been amputated of yet other elements than those of the ‘Father’. The case L ⇨ (–,–) means that political Authority is frankly and consciously revolutionary, that is to say, dominated by the ‘project’ of an essentially new future, and even opposed to the past and the present founded on the latter. The variant L ⇨ (M, J) gives us the ‘Bolshevik’ (Lenin) type; the variant L ⇨ (J, M) the ‘Menshevik’ or ‘social democrat’ type (never fully realised). The case M ⇨ (–,–) means, by contrast, the predominance of the Present, of action and ‘risk’: eventually, it is an essentially military Authority. The variant M ⇨ (L, J) corresponds, in a certain sense, to Germanic or Hitlerian ‘imperialism’ (which, nevertheless, implies an element of the Authority of the Father, which is also without any true harmony with the three other elements); that of M ⇨ (J, L) corresponds – distorting a little the reality which is in fact much more complex – to Anglo-Saxon, or even ‘bourgeois’ ‘imperialism’. But the case L ⇨ (–,–) means, by definition, a ‘permanent revolution’, that is to say, a State that is essentially non-stable, without a real duration and yet indefinite. As for the case M ⇨ (–,–), it does not represent a stable political form either – that is to say, a definitive one – if only because, the earth being round, military possibilities are limited (not to mention the risks which befall every warring enterprise). A theory of the State (by contrast with simple practice) must therefore reject these possibilities. There remains the third: J ⇨ (–,–). Founded on the ‘eternal’ principles of Justice, this form of political Authority seems capable of being stable and definitive, that is to say, acceptable even in theory. But this is only an illusion. In so far as political Authority does not imply the Past, its ‘temporal’ element (which has only two modes) is no longer in harmony with the ‘eternal’ element: the Authority of the Master (Present) and the

Leader (Future) must therefore necessarily come into conflict with the Authority of the Judge (Eternity). If, however, the Eternity that has come into conflict with Time – or more precisely, has been separated from it – no longer has any reality, Justice separated from the Authority of the Leader and the Master also loses all real Authority. It must therefore derive its reality either from the Authority of the Leader or from the Authority of the Master. But then again, it ‘gives in’ and we revert to the cases L ⇨ and M ⇨. If it is to be maintained in its dominant isolation, this Authority must rely on a political reality other than the State strictly speaking. But a reality that is political is nevertheless other than the State itself – this is what is called ‘Class’ (because the Family may act as a support for the Authority of the Father rather than for that of the Judge). The Justice in question would therefore necessarily be what Marx called ‘class justice’. In this instance, the State of type J ⇨ would be essentially ‘bourgeois’, the State being in fact absorbed by the bourgeois ‘class’. It is therefore type J ⇨ that is characteristic of the era of bourgeois domination, the variant J ⇨ (M, L) corresponding to bourgeois ‘conservatism’ (the Tories, for example), the variant J ⇨ (L, M) to ‘liberalism’ or ‘radicalism’ (the ‘radical-socialists’, for example). But given that a ‘class’ is not the whole, by definition it sets itself against another ‘class’. The type of State J ⇨, therefore, implies and necessarily engenders a conflict: that is to say, it is neither stable nor definite, and must be rejected by a true political theory. Note: We can see that, when a conservative party in power is overturned by a radical-liberal one, this is not just a case of a simple transfer of Authority, that is to say, a change of ‘support’. It is (in so far as the party truly realises its programme) a change in the very nature of Authority, and consequently of the State. Even so, this is only a change within the same type. Besides, although the transformation of J ⇨ (M, L) into J ⇨ (L, M) is conversely capable, in the course of time, of dislodging the entire political edifice, it is also possible to think of a dynamic steady state, a kind of pendulum movement. But a passage from J ⇨ to M ⇨ or L ⇨ means a change of the type itself: this change may also take the character of a ‘revolution’. Seeing that Eternity, meaning the totality of time, corresponds more particularly to the Present world (note the nunc stans aspect of Eternity), the change of the type J ⇨ into the type M ⇨ is less ‘revolutionary’ than the change from the J ⇨ to the L ⇨ types. The

(isolated) Future being the negation of Eternity, the realisation of this (isolated) Future is equivalent to the destruction of the element of Eternity in the Present. In other words, the J ⇨ type can only be transformed into the variant L ⇨ (J, M) of the L ⇨ type, and not into the variant L ⇨ (J, M), which in practice means that the revolution that transforms J+ into L+ is necessarily a bloody one, implying the actual risk of life (Authority M). The variant L ⇨ (J, M) is thus, in principle, unrealisable on the basis of the J ⇨ type: the L ⇨ (J,–) outline of political Authority will not be able to capture the Authority M that sets itself against it; and type L ⇨ gives way to type M ⇨. The destruction of the Authority of the Father is therefore fateful to political Authority in general. And it necessarily provokes the opposition of the element ‘Judge’ to the elements ‘Master’ and ‘Leader’ – that is to say, precisely the ‘separation of powers’ that we are talking about. Note: Let us see how this wrong can be mended without eliminating the tripartite division of political Authority. It is here a question of reintroducing the Authority of the Father in such a way that it does not constitute a distinct ‘Power’. It must therefore be associated with one of the three ‘Powers’, or two of them, or with all three at once. Authority exists only in so far as it is ‘recognised’; and in so far as it is ‘recognised’, it therefore exists. Consequently, the Authority of the Father will only have to be ‘recognised’ as belonging to the Leader or the Master or the Judge by those who are subject to their Authorities in order for these ‘pure’ Authorities – M, L or J – to become ‘complex’ Authorities – M, F; L, F; or J, F. Those who are subject to political Authority – that is to say, the citizens (other than the Head of State and his Civil Servants) – will therefore only have to be naturally driven towards associating the element ‘Father’ with every Authority they ‘recognise’. It is possible to assume that this will happen if the political Authority is related not to isolated individuals, but to families represented by their Leader. And thus, man should be a citizen only in so far as he is a ‘leader’ – or, more precisely, a ‘father of a family’. (But in order to avoid the ‘ancient’ conflict, he should also fulfil this role only as a citizen: in his capacity as ‘Father of a family’ he must ‘recognise’ the political Authority and not set the ‘familial’ Authority against it. It is only in this way that there could be not two opposed Authorities, F and L, M, J, but only one – political – Authority: L+F, M, J, or L+F, M+F, J, and so on.) But what

is a Family, and what is a ‘Father of a family’? (See brief article on the Family.2) It is certainly not the couple itself, nor the husband: even if the couple is human and not animal – that is to say, even if it is founded on ‘love’ – it does not constitute a political entity. But the presence of one, two or even ‘many’ children does not constitute a family either in the sense of a political entity: the production of children is a purely biological, animal activity, and their number does not change a thing about this fact. The Family is only a human entity sui generis, and it becomes a political entity capable of being a ‘citizen’, that is to say, of ‘recognising’ political Authority – the State – only in so far as it 1) educates children (that is, transforms the newly born animal into a human being), and 2) works together to create and maintain an achievement called ‘inheritance’. If the State takes away from the Family the right and the duty to educate its children, Inheritance becomes the only real base of the political essence of the Family. This Inheritance belongs to the Family taken as a whole, which derives its real political (collective) ‘individuality’ only from the unity of this Inheritance. Inheritance is therefore essentially undivided and inalienable; it is thus necessarily ‘real estate’, ‘land’. It is ‘governed’ by the ‘father of the family’, who can become a citizen only in his capacity as ‘governor’ of the Inheritance. And so, in order for our problem to be resolved, the body of the citizens must and will have to be made up only of ‘fathers of families’, defined as such. But if the State comprises also citizens other than ‘(individual or collective) fathers’, only the latter will represent the source of the political Authority of the Father. By so doing, they themselves (or their ‘representatives’) will have an Authority over the other citizens, this Authority being naturally of the Father type and having a political value. In other words, the ‘fathers of families’ (or their ‘representatives’) will make up an integral element of political Authority, representing within it the ‘pure’ type of the Authority of the Father (for example in the guise of a ‘Senate’ playing the role of Roman ‘Censors’). This means that in fact, even formally, the total political Authority will be made up of four elements (‘Powers’) and not three. If therefore – in this case, too – we want to maintain the principle of the division of political Authority (of ‘Power’) and the principle of a division into three, only one type of ‘compound’ Authority may be combined with any of the three other ‘pure’ types – for example (L+M, J, F).

Assuming that the Authority of the Father is completely eliminated, let us see what we can say about the division or separation of the three remaining types that constitute political Authority. We have seen that if we eliminate the Father element, the Judge element necessarily sets itself against the elements of Leader and Master. The separation of judicial power from the other types of ‘power’ is thus a ‘natural’ process. Let us note that it is by way of the requirement of an independent ‘judicial power’ that the idea of the ‘separation of powers’ came into being in the course of history (again in the Middle Ages – see the Magna Carta libertatis). And it is this ‘separation’ that seems the most justified: we are nowadays naturally driven to see in it a political ‘axiom’. In fact, the separation of the Authority of the Judge from the other Authorities that are part of the total political Authority is in a sense justified by the analysis of the phenomenon of ‘Authority’. Eternity setting itself against Time, the Authority of the Judge sets itself, by virtue of its essence, against the other three. Given that the Authority of the Judge is held to be ‘recognised’ by all the other ‘Authorities’, it seems natural that its ‘support’ should be distinct and independent from the ‘support(s)’ of the other Authorities. But we have also seen that the separation of the Authority of the Judge from the rest of political Authority isolates it and consequently particularises it, transforming the ‘Justice’ that is at its base into ‘class’ Justice. Note: The very violence of the polemic generated by this Marxist interpretation is an indicator that verifies its accuracy. And since this particularisation of one constitutive element of political Authority weakens it in the sense that it makes it unstable and ‘provisional’, it seems that the theory of political Authority must reject the principle of the separation of Judicial power. We are therefore in the presence of a (‘Kantian’) antinomy of political theory. And this leads us to suppose that there is here a conflation of essentially distinct entities: political justice (judging the Head of State and his Civil Servants as well as the citizens qua citizens) and ‘private’ justice (judging men qua individuals, or family members and ‘society’: penal and civil codes). (See brief article on Right.3) The theory of political Authority does not see any necessity in separating ‘private’ justice, its Authority and its ‘support’, from political Authority. But by

relating ‘private’ justice to undivided political Authority, we avoid the degeneration into ‘class’ justice, with all its political inconveniences. By contrast, ‘political’ justice must set itself against the Authority it is deemed to be able to ‘judge’, and it is natural to assign to it a distinct and independent ‘support’. Note: The whole problem consists in knowing what this support must be. The ideal would be a spontaneous genesis of the Authority of the Judge (‘manifested’ by elections, by universal suffrage for example). But in practice, the advent of a figure (individual or collective) recognised as worthy to judge all the others qua citizens, including Heads of State, is very unlikely. It therefore seems better to create this figure by drawing lots, from all citizens whoever they might be. This Judge or political Tribunal must be invested with the totality of the (political) Authority of the Judge and must be separated, or even independent, from the other Authorities. That is to say, he must judge without letting himself be guided by ‘laws’ other than the ones that he sets himself. In particular, he must not judge by relying on the Constitution – because in this case he would recognise the Authority of the ‘legislative power’ (which has the power to modify the Constitution) and would no longer be ‘separated’ from it. (There would no longer be any point in setting it up as an autonomous ‘power’). Historical experience confirms this way of seeing things: the judgement of the Convention in the trial of Louis XVI had a – positive or negative – indisputable political value; and attempts to try Heads of State or high-ranking civil servants by a ‘judicial’ court of law have failed miserably, whether in Russia in 1917 or in Riom in 1942. Assuming that total political Authority implies only three elements (being deprived of the element Father), we can say that the (political) element of Judge must be ‘separated’ from the elements Leader and Master. We should now ask ourselves if the latter must also be separated one from the other, as is required by the ‘constitutional’ theory. But theory, practice and simple good sense here agree to reject this ‘constitutional’ requirement. If we were to take the separation of legislative and executive ‘powers’ seriously, this would be equivalent to the institution of a ‘power’ supposed to foresee everything in advance without being able to do anything, faced with another power supposed to be able to do everything without being able to foresee anything in

advance. In the case of conflict between the two (and ‘separation’ has no meaning unless we accept the possibility of a conflict), the executive ‘power’ would immediately crush the legislative ‘power’, and the State would cease to exist in its given form. Note: This is why, in States with separated ‘powers’, the legislative ‘power’ tends to weaken, or even cancel, the executive ‘power’, while the latter tries – with less ‘conviction’, since it effectively possesses the real power – to render the legislative ‘power’ illusory. The separation of these two ‘powers’ leads therefore generally to the abolition of one of them, that is to say, to a new amputation of political Authority, in so far as one of them fails to ‘capture’ the other by becoming a complex ‘power’ – that is to say, a non-‘separated’ one. Metaphysically speaking, legislative ‘power’, which – in so far as it is not pure force – is nothing other than the Authority of the Leader, represents the ‘authoritarian’ aspect of the existence of the Future, while the executive ‘power’, which realises the Authority of the Master, represents the Present. But the Future separated from the Present is a pure abstraction deprived of any metaphysical ‘substance’. And this translates, on the level of human and political existence, as the fact that the Authority of the Leader, isolated from that of the Master, takes a ‘utopian’ character: the legislation that is separated from its execution constructs a ‘Utopia’ with no ties with the Present (that is to say, reality), which subsequently fails to come true (that is to say, it fails to remain in force in the Present), and it drags along with it in its downfall the Authority that has produced it – and, with it, the State itself in its ‘separated’ form. As for the Present, it becomes ‘dehumanised’ in so far as it detaches itself from the Future. This means – on the political plane – that the ‘separated’ executive ‘power’ degenerates into a mere ‘administration’ or ‘police’ (the Police-Government): it becomes a pure ‘technique’ that deals only with what is, that is to say with ‘raw’ information. But ‘raw information’ is nothing other than the state of present forces. It is therefore force that determines the action of the separated executive ‘power’: it becomes a class ‘administration’ or ‘police’, as the Marxists say. That is to say, it loses its political Authority of Master. The ‘separated’ State is thus cancelled as a ‘State’: on the one hand, the Authority of the Master (executive power), which is supposed to be ‘separated’ from the others, that is to say, to have an independent

‘support’, completely ceases to exist. On the other hand, and as a consequence of this, the Authority of the Leader (legislative power) is extinguished in a Utopia; the separation of legislative and executive ‘powers’ leads therefore to the elimination of the Authorities of the Master and the Leader; political Authority (from which the Authority of the Father has already been excluded), that is to say, the Authority of the State, is thus reduced to a pure and simple Judge’s Authority; and we can ask ourselves how far in such conditions a State, strictly speaking, still exists. Note: If we call the ensemble constituted by the Authorities of the Master and the Leader ‘governmental Authority’, we can say that in a State where political Authority is reduced to that of the Judge, there is no Government, or that this State no longer has any Authority, having in its power only pure force. As for the remaining judicial Authority, it can no longer be political – that is to say, it can no longer deal with the other Authorities embodied by the State, since they no longer exist. So it becomes a private – civil and penal – judicial Authority. There is no longer, strictly speaking, a State or citizens as such: there is a ‘Society’ made up of isolated individuals (‘private’ persons), having rights and duties towards each other, which are regulated by the (‘private’) judicial Authority, and the Government is nothing more than a force, with the responsibility of carrying out the acts of the judicial Authority. It seems appropriate to reserve the term ‘State’ only for societies that imply the sui generis element that is called ‘Government’, the latter being the support of the Authorities of Leader and Master combined. Therefore, political Authority, being by definition the Authority of the State, necessarily implies an element of governmental Authority (which can – and perhaps must – imply also other Authorities). And our analysis shows that it is not possible for governmental Authority to be preserved by separating the Authority of the Leader from that of the Master, that is to say, by allocating to each one of them ‘supports’ that are truly independent from one another. Even if we want to eliminate the Authority of the Father and allocate to that of the Judge an independent ‘support’, the Authorities of Leader and Master must be kept united: political Authority deprived of the Father element can therefore only be divided into two. But in carrying out this bipartite division, we have to heed the fact

that governmental Authority truly implies the element of Leader as much as that of Master. Otherwise, as we have just seen, it degenerates and disappears, dragging along in its downfall the State itself qua state. Note 1: Governmental Authority can be either of the M, L type or the L, M type. In the first case, it is the Authority of the Master that ‘captures’ and ‘engenders’ that of the Leader, the first being thus ‘primary’, the other ‘derivative’. In the second case, it is the reverse that happens. Both cases must be analysed, but we cannot do this here. Note 2: The Authority of the Leader is that of the ‘project’ or, if you like, of the ‘programme’. And so the spontaneous genesis of this Authority happens as a consequence of a ‘programme’ put forth by a – collective or individual – person claiming to play the role of ‘support’ for this Authority. This genesis takes place in and by the act of ‘recognition’ that is manifested by a vote. We can therefore accept the existence of an Assembly, which confirms a Leader in his Authority as Leader. But this Assembly can vote only for or against the person, that is to say, for or against the ‘support’, by giving him in addition carte blanche for his activity, that is to say, for the exercise of Authority. This Assembly is therefore not a ‘power’ distinct from governmental ‘power’ and opposed to it: it is part of the Government, doing nothing other than manifesting externally the Authority of the latter. Theoretically speaking, nothing can contest the nomination of the members of this Assembly by the Government. In so far as the Authority of the Leader is transmitted (and not spontaneous), it is the nomination that becomes imperative: the (individual or collective) Head of State whose Authority is real, that is to say, ‘recognised’, nominates his ‘collaborators’ (that is to say, the members of Government who have the character of Civil Servants), and he can nominate his ‘successor’. Authority passes in this way to the ‘nominated’ without the intervention of the Assembly being necessary: the Authority of the civil servant and the successor of the Leader of the State does not depend on the Assembly. But it can judge the ‘support’ of this Authority, that is to say, make manifest through its vote the fact that this or that other concrete (individual or collective) person effectively ‘materialises’ the Authority transmitted to him by the nomination of the Leader of the State. This means in practice that the Assembly can give its opinion about a candidate designated (nominated) by the Government. But since here, too, it is a case of a judgement about the person, and

more precisely about his aptitude to serve as the ‘support’ of a given Authority, it would be better for the Assembly to give its opinion not at the time of the nomination strictly speaking, but some time (six months or a year, for example) after the nominee had started exercising his functions. As for the Authority of the Master, it does not have a reality where no risk – not even virtual – of life is at stake. As long as there is no war or revolution that can lead the State or the Government to its ruin, this devastation having as its consequence the putting to death of the person who embodies it, an artificial ‘mortal danger’ must be created for the Leader of the State and the members of the Government. (And the theory precisely requires the existence of such a mortal danger for the person of the Leader of the State and the members of Government, without this danger being at the same time mortal for the State itself or the Government as such – that is to say, a danger other than the ones that come in the guise of wars, revolutions, coups d’état, and so on.) In practice, this danger is often represented by the struggle to the death between candidates for the Authority of Master (compare Robespierre’s Terror, the Moscow ‘Trials’, the events of 22 June in Germany,4 and so on). But it seems that in theory it is better to create this danger as a function of the existence of a (judicial) Authority separate from that of the Government, that is to say, one having an independent ‘support’. This Authority might be, for example, the political Tribunal that we discussed earlier: a Leader (legislator) could be sentenced to death by this Tribunal, and would by the same token enjoy the benefit of the (executive) Authority of the Master. (This Tribunal is therefore held to eliminate the danger of the ‘utopianism’ of legislation.) It even seems that, to reach this goal, this Tribunal must have just two possible verdicts: an award for outstanding merit or the death sentence. There has to be a risk of the death sentence in order for ‘mastery’ to exist. And simple acquittal seems to have no meaning here: acquittal would mean the simple incapability of the Leader (without any ‘bad will’ on his part); or, in this case, it seems that the Leader has to be eliminated by the simple loss of Authority, without the intervention of the Tribunal being necessary; the latter becomes necessary only in the case of the existence of an ‘antipope’; but the ‘anti-pope’ – that is to say, the opponent of the Leader himself having Authority – can only be a political criminal who it is out

of the question to acquit. (In other words, the tribunal must either ‘recognise’ the ‘anti-pope’, that is to say, sanction a ‘political revolution’ and see in him a ‘hero’, or tax his Authority with ‘high treason’, which is essentially punishable by putting to death.) In all times and ages, political crimes have always been punished more severely than others – even in the degenerate State of Nicolas II. The fact that in modern ‘democracies’ we lean towards political clemency proves only one thing: the loss of any sense of the ‘political’ in general. The division of amputated political Authority must therefore be bipartite: (political) judicial Authority and governmental Authority (of the Leader–legislator who is at the same time Master–executive, or vice versa). But we have seen that it might be useful to reintroduce the element of the Authority of the Father into political Authority. In so far as it is impossible (or undesirable) to reduce the number of citizens to that of ‘Fathers of families’, this will come down to the creation of an Authority of the Father separated from that of the Government and the Judge, that is to say, having an independent ‘support’. We find once more here a tripartite division of political Authority, but one that is different from the Authority advocated by ‘constitutional’ theory. Political Authority (the Authority of the State) is divided into: 1) pure Authority (of the Father), having as its ‘support’ the Senate-censor of the ‘representatives’ of ‘fathers of families’; 2) the Authority of the Government, that is to say the ‘complex’ Authority of the Leader–Master or Master–Leader, having as its support a) the (individual or collective) Head of State, b) the Civil Servants, c) the (nominated or ‘elected’) manifestant assembly;5 and 3) the (pure) Authority of the Judge, having as its ‘support’ the political Tribunal (appointed by random allocation). The State is nothing other than the reality of this triple Authority. However, we may ask ourselves whether, generally speaking, the separation of any ‘powers’ or political Authorities, whatever they may be, is prescribed or prohibited by political theory. But this is a very complex question. There is no doubt that, on the one hand, every Authority tends to become total: the Authority of one given type tends to capture the Authorities of other types. On the other hand, the metaphysical structure of Authority is antithetical to its division: three modes of Time naturally constitute one bloc, and Eternity is real only in and through its union

with Time. It therefore seems that analysis of the phenomenon of ‘Authority’ prohibits any division of political Authority, and any ‘separation of powers’. It is therefore useless to insist on all the arguments of a practical nature that have been set against the ‘constitutional’ theory and practice (see for example Rousseau). It seems that, generally speaking, the division of an entity weakens it: the sum total of the powers of separated parts is less than the power of the same undivided whole. In fact, the division is not real (it has a ‘meaning’ and a raison d’être) only if the separated parts are inclined to enter into conflict with one another; or if a conflict (even a ‘latent’ one) looks as if it must necessarily ‘neutralise’ a part of the powers that are in question, in such a way that this ‘lost’ part of the power constituted by the sum total of powers of the separated parts, taken in isolation, would need to be deducted. Thus it seems better to give a political Authority taken en bloc one and the same (collective or individual) ‘support’. But the arguments – of a practical nature – uttered in favour of the thesis of the separation of powers are also very strong. Besides, these arguments are also well known, and we need not elaborate on them. Let us just say that the metaphysical analysis itself can, in a certain sense, be cited in support of the thesis in question. In fact, if it is true that the three modes of Time form a unity, it is also true that there would be no Time at all if there were no separation between the three modes – that is to say, also some sort of ‘tension’ or ‘conflict’ between them. Similarly, if Eternity, being the totality of the three modes of time, forms a unity with it, it is also opposed to it in so far as the totality (the whole) is something other than the sum total of the parts. It is simply that, in both cases, the opposition, or, if we like, the separation, does not mean isolation of the separated or the opposed. There is interaction – that is to say, separation, since there are two (or several) agents; but there is also union, since there is action of an agent on one or many others inseparable from the reaction. It follows for the question that interests us that, even when we want to separate the Authorities that in their ensemble constitute political Authority, they must not be isolated from one another by having each one of them withdraw into itself. They have to be able to act and react on one another: their dynamic union must be preserved despite their static division. (For example, if we separate the – legislative – Authority

of the Leader from the – political–judicial – Authority of the Judge, the latter must not be pinned down by a system of laws that are in principle immutable, or by a Constitution that is supposedly unchangeable. Conversely, we must not establish the Authority of an ‘irresponsible’ Leader, as is the case with that of the Monarch – that is to say, diminish the action of the Authority of the Judge, and so on.) But if the thesis of the ‘isolating’ separation of Authorities is rejected, should the principle of separation itself be preserved? In order to answer this question, let us make a remark that is generally overlooked: when one and the same (individual or collective) ‘support’ is used by several ‘pure’ types of Authority, there is always a tendency to develop one of those types (the ‘dominant’ or ‘primary’ type) at the expense of the others: the ‘derivative’ types cannot manage to develop completely as such, and remain at an embryonic stage. If we wish the four ‘pure’ types of Authority to be perfectly and completely realised, it is therefore necessary to allocate independent ‘supports’ to each one of them – that is to say, to ‘separate powers’. Note: This is also true for the Authority of the Leader and the Authority of the Master, which nevertheless cannot be separated. But there is here no political hindrance, because we can show that with political progress the Authority of the Master must give way to that of the Leader – that is to say, it will ‘degenerate’. It even seems that it must completely disappear in the ‘ideal’ State of the future. Generally speaking, the Authority of the Master presupposes the real possibility of war and bloody revolution, and it thus presupposes its own disappearance along with them. Political evolution goes from the unity of political ‘power’ to the separation of ‘powers’. But what we have just said ‘justifies’ this state of things: in order for each ‘pure’ type to reach the plenitude of its development, it has to be separated from the others. But this does not mean that Authorities must remain ‘divided’ even after they have realised all their implicit possibilities. It seems, on the contrary, that they will have to reunite again. Political evolution would therefore start from the non-differentiated unity (the unity of the embryonic form), and go through a period of division and development of the separated elements, finally leading to totality – that is to say, to differentiated unity (the unity of the adult organism).

In order to answer the question as to whether political Authority must be divided or not (and if yes, how) – that is to say, whether ‘powers’ must be ‘separated’ – we have to understand the position occupied by a given State in the progress of political evolution: we have to understand the nature of its concrete political reality. Of course, we cannot undertake studies of this kind here. Let us rather say a few words about the other aspect of the problem of the division of political Authority – namely, the relations between an undivided (‘pure’ or ‘complex’) Authority and its ‘support’. b) If political Authorities are divided, it goes without saying that each one of them must have a distinct ‘support’. In other words, each Authority must be embodied by a particular person. But again, we must ask ourselves whether this person must be one individual only or a ‘college’. And the same question arises when political Authority is not divided. It is in the latter form that the problem has generally been addressed. The ‘classic’ classification is as follows. The one and indivisible political Authority belongs: 1. to a single person – Monarch (Tyranny) 2. to a part (understood as a minority) – Aristocracy (Oligarchy) 3. to everyone – Democracy This division is very ‘Kantian’, since it corresponds to the three Kantian categories of Quantity: Einheit, Vielheit, Allheit. But from a political point of view, it is not correct. In fact, what matters most in politics is to know whether action ultimately emanates from one single man or from a ‘college’. From this point of view, the difference between one person and a group of any kind is greater than that between more or less extended groups. Added to that is the fact that, politically speaking, the collective ‘support’ of Authority never involves all those who are subject to it. Even in the most extreme form of ‘democracy’, the term ‘all’ means ‘all citizens’, and not all human beings (living in the State). And yet the boundary between citizens and non-citizens is always more or less arbitrary (note the question of women, children, the mad, and so on), in such a way that the

‘support’ of Authority always has more or less the value of a ‘part’, of ‘many’. Besides, in its political realisation, ‘power’ does not even belong to all citizens: it belongs to the majority – that is to say, to one part. Note 1: The case where power belongs to all citizens could be eliminated as politically unrealistic, if it had not been realised at some point in Poland (the famous right of veto, whereby Authority = unanimity). But this very experience illustrates the political absurdity of this variant. Consequently, we can only see in it a ‘borderline case’, and not a possibility linked to that of the government of the one and the many. Note 2: If we accept these remarks concerning the notion of ‘all’ in politics, another logically possible classification must be rejected as well. In other words, that Authority belongs I. to a part [1. to one [2. to many [a. to the minority [b. to the majority II. To all Because we cannot really divide all States that have existed into I) the Polish State and II) all others! The politically correct classification is therefore the following. (Undivided) political Authority has a ‘support’, that is I. individual II. collective, made up of: [part of the citizens, and this part constitutes [a. a minority [b. a majority [all citizens (borderline case) The respective advantages and disadvantages of possibilities I and II have been debated ad infinitum. We cannot revisit here the arguments of both sides of the debate. But we can reveal one aspect of the problem that has generally been overlooked. It is said that, when the ‘support’ is collective, there is a danger of conflict between the members of the

collective, and that such conflict can weaken, or even destroy, Authority itself. In the case where Authority belongs to a ‘pure’ type, the argument is valid. But when Authority is ‘complex’, things are less straightforward, because in this case one and the same man can enter into conflict with himself: taken as a Leader, for example, he can set himself against himself taken as a Judge or a Father. However, when the conflict of Authorities is played out within one and the same man, it leads to (physical or political) suicide – that is to say, to the destruction of the ‘support’, and thus the destruction of the total Authority itself – that is, in most cases, to the elimination of one of the (partial) Authorities in conflict to the advantage of another. (And it is precisely for this reason that these conflicts seem to be less frequent within individuals than in the case of the collective.) Conversely, in the case of a collective ‘support’, partial Authorities in conflict are generally divided between different individuals, and they are thus less prone to being eliminated by anyone among them. If the ‘support’ serves a ‘pure’ political Authority, it is therefore preferable that this should be individual (‘discussion’ must be carried out among the candidates for ‘support’ of this Authority, and not within the ‘support’ itself). But when political Authority is ‘complex’, a collective ‘support’ seems deservedly favoured. (Example: the ‘support’ of the Authority M or L should be individual. But if we do not want Authority ML or LM to degenerate into Authority M or L, it would be better for its ‘support’ to be collective.) Assuming that the ‘support’ of undivided political Authority is collective, we can ask ourselves what its quantitative nature must be. We can eliminate the case II, 2. Note: At first sight, this case seems nonexistent, since one cannot have an Authority over oneself. But let us not forget that it is here a question of political Authority, which can set itself against Authorities of a different kind – that is to say, Authorities realised in a ‘sphere’ other than the political one, against religious Authority for example (which can also, for that matter, comprise all four types of ‘pure’ Authority as such). Even if all citizens serve as a ‘support’ for political Authority, there is still one political Authority, because each person serves as a ‘support’ for the latter only in so far as he is a citizen, and not homo economicus or homo religiosus, for example. As a religious person, and so on, I can

therefore ‘recognise’ – that is to say, create – the political Authority for which I shall myself serve as a ‘support’ in my capacity as citizen. The case does exist, theoretically speaking. But it is politically speaking unreal, since Authority that is ‘supported’ in this manner would not be able to preserve itself. It therefore remains to be discovered whether the ‘support’ of (undivided) political Authority has to constitute the minority (case II, 1, a) or the majority (case II, 1, b) of the citizens. We have seen that the Majority (Minority) has no extra Authority derived from the mere fact that it is a Majority (Minority): Authority has nothing to do with quantity. From this point of view, it therefore makes no difference whether the support of (undivided) political Authority is constituted by one person, or by a Majority, or by a more or less large Minority. All that we have to ask is whether a majority ‘support’ is more appropriate than a minority one for the preservation and exercise of a given Authority. And yet it is obvious that, if the ‘support’ of political Authority is identified with the (collective) Head of State, it is out of the question that this support should constitute the majority of the citizens of a State even if it is small in size. But, in fact, the ‘support’ of political Authority is not just the Head of State (or the ‘Government’), but also the ensemble of civil servants. Our question therefore comes down to understanding whether the body of civil servants must constitute the majority of citizens or not – that is to say, whether or not it is necessary to ‘bureaucratise’ (fonctionnariser) as many citizens as possible. But this question is too complex to be discussed here. Nor can we discuss the question of the ‘support’ of a ‘separated’ political Authority. It goes without saying that there are as many independent ‘supports’ as there are distinct Authorities (three, in the system of Senate–Government–Tribunal). But we should also ask ourselves whether these ‘supports’ should be collective or not (or if this should be the case for some of them), and, if so, we need to know whether one of them should encompass the majority of the citizens or not. Without discussing these questions, let us just say that they cannot be resolved by applying the principle indicated earlier, following which an individual ‘support’ is better assigned to a ‘pure’ Authority, reserving the collective ‘support’ to ‘complex’ Authorities, because there it was a

question of a global political Authority having the ‘pure’ F, L, M or J type. Here, by contrast, the Authorities in question (of the F, LM and J types, for example) are constitutive elements of the global political Authority.

2. The transmission of Authority a) Let us first of all examine the case where the ‘support’ of the same Authority (be it individual or collective) changes: this is the problem of ‘succession’, both for the Head of State and for the Civil Servant. Generally speaking, we can distinguish within every Authority: 1. The person possessing it in an immediate way: ‘autonomous’ Authority (of the Head of State) 2. The person who has it only in relation to the former: ‘dependent’ Authority (of the Civil Servant) Let us first remember that the transmission of Authority, as opposed to its spontaneous genesis, can take place by 1. heredity 2. election 3. nomination We have already seen that what is generally called ‘election’ can represent three ‘phenomena’ that are clearly different. ‘Election’ can be a simple manifestation of an already existing Authority: the election does nothing other than make the Authority of the candidate, which he already possesses independently of his election, visible and real. In this case, it would be better to speak not of an ‘election’, but of a ‘vote of confidence’, for example. But election (strictly speaking) can also create the Authority of the elected person, who has no Authority other than that which has been assigned to him by his election. This is election in the proper sense of the term. And we have already seen that, ‘phenomenologically’ speaking, such an election is similar to a drawing

of lots among candidates. Finally, the ‘election’ can have the character of a nomination if the electoral assembly has at its disposal its own Authority that can be transmitted (partly or entirely) to the elected. In this case, we would be talking about ‘nomination’ and not ‘election’. Let us now look at the case where the Authority of the (individual or collective) Head of State, that is to say the ‘support’ of the ‘autonomous’ and undivided political Authority, is transmitted to his successor (in his lifetime or after his death). We have seen that transmission by heredity is phenomenologically indefensible (except in the case of the Authority of the Father – and even in this case there is no genuine ‘inheritance’). Besides, it seems completely discredited these days. The same remarks apply to election strictly speaking – that is to say, to the drawing of lots (carried out in the guise of a vote of an Assembly without an Authority of its own, or otherwise). There remains, therefore, nomination. And yet, given that political Authority is supposedly undivided, ultimately nomination cannot be carried out except by the Head of State himself: it is he who nominates his successor. It is obvious that this mode of transmission does not represent an advantage except in the case where we want to preserve for whatever reason the Authority belonging specifically to the person of the Leader who nominates his successor. (Example: this is how a religious sect sometimes preserves the Authority of its founder in the form of successive nominations, ultimately leading back to its founder.) But we must not forget that this Authority tends to decrease as the number of nominations increases. It might therefore be useful to dissociate political Authority as such from the proper (‘personal’) Authority of one of its ‘supports’. It would also be better to replace nomination with a spontaneous genesis of autonomous Authority. In this case, ‘succession’ would in reality be a succession of spontaneous geneses of the same Authority (this genesis being able to ‘manifest’ itself by a ‘vote of confidence’, for example). In the case where political Authority is divided, the problem of succession (where the ‘support’ is autonomous) arises for each Authority separately. The question thus becomes more complex, and we cannot address it here. Note: Let us point out that, in the F–LM–J type of State, the

autonomous Authority of the Senate–censor can be transmitted by heredity; that of the Government by spontaneous genesis, manifested by a vote of confidence of the representative assembly; that of the Tribunal by a drawing of lots (for example in the guise of an election, perhaps even by universal suffrage). Let us now examine the case of the transmission of ‘dependent’ Authority – that is to say, the way Civil Servants are replaced. Given that the ‘dependent’ Authority of the civil servant varies according to his ‘autonomous’ political Authority, it would be better if this dependence were each time emphasised. In other words, the transmission of Authority must take place here through nomination. The Civil Servant must, therefore, always be nominated: ultimately by the Head of State, if the political Authority is undivided, or by the ‘support’ of the autonomous Authority on which the Civil Servant depends, if political Authority is divided. b) In this way, we have given an answer to the second question regarding the transmission of Authority – that is to say, the transformation of autonomous Authority (of a given type) into an independent Authority (of the same type). It is not the civil servant who designates his successor; and neither is there a spontaneous genesis of dependent Authority (of the civil servant); there is neither heredity, nor drawing of lots, nor election strictly speaking; the civil servant is replaced in the same way he is created – that is to say, by a nomination carried out by the corresponding autonomous Authority, which has ultimately as its ‘support’ its individual or collective ‘leader’. Note: In the F–LM–J type of State, it is the Senate–censor that nominates, when applicable, the Censors–civil servants, in the same way that the Tribunal nominates, should this happen, the ‘Tribunes’ or the Judges and (political)–civil servants. The rest of the civil servants are nominated by the Government, in the narrow sense of the term – that is to say, either directly by their individual or collective leader, or indirectly through State Secretaries or Ministers.

II. ETHICAL APPLICATIONS

We shall call the ‘ethics of Authority’ or ‘authoritarian ethics’ the sum total of rules to which the active behaviour of the (individual or collective) being must be subjected in order for it to be able to act as a ‘support’ for Authority. ‘Authoritarian ethics’ indicates therefore what needs to be done in order to acquire and preserve (that is to say, exert) an Authority of a given type. But, since there are four ‘pure’ types of Authority, there are also, by necessity, four irreducible types of ‘authoritarian ethics’: in order to acquire and preserve the Authority of the Father, for example, there has to be something else different from what is needed to acquire and preserve that of the Master, and so on. Nowadays, there is a general tendency to completely neglect the ‘authoritarian’ (or even political) aspect of ethics by excluding from such considerations the category of Authority and the principle of the essential difference between those who exert it and those who are subject to it. This is explained by the fact that our Christian or ‘bourgeois’ morality is, at least as far as its origins are concerned, ‘slavish’ and thus in conflict with the morality of the ‘Masters’: it reflects the behaviour of men subject to Authority, rather than that of those who exert it. But among the four types of ‘pure’ authoritarian ethics, it is that of the Authority of the Judge that comes closest to ‘bourgeois’ morality. Also, when we try to establish an ethics that takes into account the fact of the existence of some Authority, it is that of the ‘Judge’ type that we particularly tend to consider. And we apply this particular ethics to every Authority without caring to know to which type it actually belongs. But study of the past provides us with a great deal of information on the ethics of Authority of the ‘Master’ type: we find this study presented more or less explicitly (that is to say, in the form of a theory) in the Authors of Antiquity, as well as those of the European sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (see in particular Castiglione’s The Courtier), of the Japanese and Hindu middle ages, and so on. But here too, of course, the authors believe they are dealing with moral

philosophy tout court: they do not place enough emphasis on the aspect of ‘Authority’ in general, and do not take into account the other types of Authority. As for ethics related to the Authorities of the Father and the Leader, this does not exist in any explicit form: we have historical and psychological descriptions of the behaviour of Fathers and Leaders, but no theory has been deduced from them. We cannot make up for this shortcoming here, nor in general develop the theory of the four irreducible types of the Ethics of Authority. Let us content ourselves with the mere act of indicating the problem, adding that we must also develop the question of ‘combined’ authoritarian ethics, seeing that in practice Authority almost never exists in the form of an isolated ‘pure’ type. It is also a question of seeing in which respect ‘pure’ ethics must be modified as a result of its fusion into a single ‘complex’ ethics of a given type. Let us simply say that it is quite obviously absurd to want to ‘judge’ the Authority of a given type (or more precisely the behaviour of its ‘support’) from the point of view of an ethics belonging to another type of Authority. The well-known facts of ‘tragic’ conflicts – that is to say, intractable ones – between Authorities of diverse types (those of the Father and the Leader for example), constitute sufficient evidence in support of this point. The elaboration of a theoretical moral philosophy of Authority is a question of practical interest: first of all because it could serve as a rule of behaviour for those who are about to exercise Authority, or who are in effect already exercising Authority. But the dissemination of such explicit ethics could also train the ‘psychology’ of those who are subject to Authority, thus making its acquisition and preservation easier: it is less difficult to preserve an Authority if the people who are supposed to be subject to it know what needs to be done in order to preserve it (and see, of course, that this is done effectively). Thus, the study of the moral philosophy of Authority leads naturally to the study (and pedagogical training) of the psychology of Authority.

III. PSYCHOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS

By ‘psychology of Authority’, we understand the way man experiences the exerted or endured Authority (of a given type). The study of the psychology of exerted Authority provokes only theoretical interest, because in practice, at least nowadays, it is out of the question to educate the candidates for Authority by training their ‘authoritarian’ psychology through an appropriate pedagogy founded on the knowledge of the theory of this psychology. Note: This study has a practical interest only where Authority is transmitted by heredity. That is why, so to speak, nothing else has been studied in the field of authoritarian psychology except that of the hereditary Monarch – without paying much attention to the type to which his Authority belongs. They have tried to create ‘leadership schools’ in Hitler’s Germany (the Ordensburgen), as they did at some colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. Theoretical study of the psychology of Authority submitted to has, by contrast, besides its intrinsic interest, an indisputable practical value. In fact, it is the knowledge of this psychology that must serve as a basis for all rational – that is to say, truly effective – ‘propaganda’ or ‘demagogy’. (We understand by ‘demagogy’ the political education of the people, that is to say, a pedagogical activity using the means provided by what today we call ‘propaganda’.) It is by knowing what the typical man experiences when he is subjected to an Authority, which amounts to saying what he expects from those who exert it, that we can make him see that he is effectively dealing with an Authority, and one that is ‘properly’ exerted – or, at least, make him believe that this is the case. And we can – and even must – correct his psychological reactions, by making him effectively experience what is experienced in the ‘normal’ (or even ‘moral’) case of a ‘correctly’ exercised and endured Authority. Without being able to study the problem of the psychology of Authority, let us just repeat that it is a question of distinguishing between these four ‘pure’ types, and seeing in what way they are modified as a result of their fusion. It is, indeed, obvious that we are subject to the Authority of the Father, for example, in a way totally different from that of the Master. Before undertaking a demagogical

propaganda (in the non-pejorative sense of the term), we must therefore know exactly to which type (‘pure’ or ‘complex’) the Authority belongs to whose acquisition or preservation we want to contribute by this ‘pedagogical’ means. But it is impossible to establish the ‘normal psychology’ of political Authority without knowing its ethics, which presupposes on its part recognition of the political realisation of Authority in the form of the State. And all this presupposes a philosophical analysis of the phenomenon of Authority as such (independently from the question of knowing whether it is realised in a political, religious or other form): a phenomenological analysis first, then a metaphysical one, and finally an ontological one. Instead of continuing our general deductions, let us briefly study – in an Appendix – a concrete case of political Authority: the Authority that exists in France in 1942. 1 [This could be a reference to a manuscript that is yet to be identified in Kojève’s papers, just like the present volume which is mentioned in exactly the same way in Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, and then found years later in Kojève’s papers.]

2 [There is a substantial section on familial society in Kojève’s Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, but it is unknown whether this is the text mentioned here, or whether there is an independent study on the subject in his papers.]

3 [This could be a reference to Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, as it could be a shorter text which was later developed into the book we know today.]

4 [22 June 1941 was the date of the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union. But the author seems rather to have had in mind the ‘night of long knives’ of 30 June 1934, i.e. Hitler’s purge of Röhm and other opponents.]

5 [Assemblée manifestante is a neologism coined by Kojève, and seems to resonate with the widely

debated question after the French Revolution of whether political legitimacy rests with the ‘institutional Republic’ or the demands of the street, also referred to as rue manifestante. By

analogy, we can retain the notion of ‘participant in public demonstration’ in ‘manifestant’, since this is exactly the political authority with which Kojève associates this assembly. Unlike other post-Revolutionary constitutional bodies, such as the ‘Constituent Assembly’, the manifestant

assembly is not empowered to elect or designate, and neither is it authorised to make or amend a

constitution. The role of Kojève’s manifestant assembly is only to agree or disagree.]

Appendices

1. AN ANALYSIS OF THE MARSHAL’S AUTHORITY

The advent of the Marshal to power is a typical case of the spontaneous genesis of political Authority. Let us see to which type the Authority belongs that has as its ‘support’ the person of the Marshal. Before the events of 1939–40, he was mainly known to the general public as a military leader, as the victor in the Battle of Verdun. He thus had a warrior’s authority – that is to say, in our terminology, he acted as (individual) ‘support’ to the Authority of the ‘Master’ type. It is this Authority of Master that propaganda emphasises the most, by presenting the Marshal to the people as the ‘Victor of Verdun’. And it is mainly thanks to this Authority of Master that the Marshal can – in the political sphere, in the narrow sense of the word – act without giving explanations, without justifying his acts, without indicating their motives, their goal or their consequences – that is to say, without explaining their meaning. But the nation’s elite also knew the role played by the Marshal during the army mutinies [of 1917]: the ‘political’ aspect of his military activity was highly appreciated; it was known that he was able to foresee events, to stop their development, and to reorganise the present with the future in mind. In other words, the Marshal also enjoyed the benefit of the Authority of Leader, in the sense that we attribute to this term. It is to this Authority of Leader that the Marshal claims adherence when he often tells the people: ‘I am leading you, follow me!’ It is this Authority of Leader that is manifested by a project or a programme, even one that is not understood by the people, and it is accepted without a ‘reaction’ by the mere fact that is it articulated or supported by the Marshal. Note: Many politicians have tried to grab some of the Leader’s Authority by claiming that they foresaw the defeat, or at least that they

advised against going to war in anticipation of its outcome. The Marshal cannot found his Authority of Leader on such ‘predictions’. But he was not involved in the outbreak of war, and so he was not wrong; he did not show any lack of foresight. His Authority as Leader, acquired in 1917, therefore remained unsullied in 1940. Besides, the advanced age of the Marshal, the fact that he has already reached the pinnacle of glory, and, generally speaking, the obvious ‘nobility’ of his character – all this contributed also to investing him with the Authority of Judge. In the eyes of the nation, the Marshal is fundamentally ‘disinterested’, impartial, objective – that is to say, just, equitable and honest. It is in order to consolidate this Judge’s Authority that the Marshal pronounced at the very beginning of office the beautiful sentence (often repeated by propaganda): ‘I have made France a gift of my person.’ And it is by relying on this Authority of Judge that he could reach a decision in the case of the accused in the Riom trial even before they had been tried by a court of law. Finally, the character, the behaviour and the essentially ‘French’ lifestyle, the real and manifest French ‘essence’ of the Marshal, in concert with his age, have made of his person an (individual) ‘support’ of the Authority of the Father. It is this Father’s Authority that the Marshal (and sometimes propaganda) shows in his ‘paternal’ tone and attitude. And it is this Authority of the Father that gives the people the certainty that, by following the Marshal as Leader, by having a blind faith in him as master, by accepting him as Judge, there will be no betrayal of either the immediate interests of the day or of future perspectives, while loyally it maintained to the traditions of the past. We can therefore say that there was in 1940 a spontaneous genesis (not manifested by a ‘vote of confidence’) of a total political Authority, with the Marshal as (individual) ‘support’ for all four types of ‘pure’ Authority (in political form). Note: A more meticulous investigation might reveal the particular nature of this total political Authority – that is to say, the order of the four ‘pure’ Authorities that it implies (the ‘variants’ FLMJ, LMFJ, MLJF, and so on). It even seems that this order has changed over time. Let us now see what has come of this total political Authority as a result of its exercise. We can start with the Authority of the Master. Its proper sphere being

war, a policy that is essentially and manifestly peaceful and pacifist must inevitably weaken it and then, little by little, annihilate it. In addition, the Marshal’s advanced age prevents him from presenting himself to the people as the effective military leader of a possible war to come. Note: If we want to preserve for the State the Authority of the Master, then a ‘support’ must be found for this Authority other than the person of the Marshal. It seems that this is what led him to appoint the Admiral as his successor. In fact, a person capable of exercising effective military command has to be to the fore in the case of a potential war to come. Note the theme of propaganda: ‘The Admiral has never been defeated’; it is therefore mainly his Authority as Master that the propaganda wants to consolidate or generate. It therefore seems that the Marshal will have to play down his Authority as Master. This will require him to present some explanation to the people. Note: ‘Governmental’ Authority, that is to say the ‘complex’ Authority Master–Leader that seems at the time of the 1940 Armistice to have been of the ML type, is tending to be transformed into a ‘governmental’ Authority of the LM type. The Authority of the Father, on the other hand (very strong from the start), remained unsullied. Measures felt to be ‘non-French’ seem to be accepted by the people as voluntary and inconsequential ‘tactical retreats’. In any case, thanks to the support of the Authority of the Father, which remains intact, ‘governmental’ Authority still enjoys the benefit of the prestige which policies that are essentially French (‘national’) can have in France. (As a matter of fact, the Marshal and propaganda stress very well the ‘Tradition’ aspect.) Except that the ‘specific importance’ of the Past cannot be very impressive at this time. The Present has reached such a ‘deplorable’ point that the Nation desires before all else to find a way out of it – that is to say, to move on, to penetrate into the Future. The Authority of the Future (= Authority of the Leader) is therefore more powerful than that of the Past (= Authority of the Father). Consequently, total Authority is, or will be, not of the type F ⇨, but of the type L ⇨ (or LM ⇨). In other words, the Authority of the Father must not ‘found’ but must ‘assist’ that of the Leader. Let us now move on to the Authority of the Judge. Certainly, nothing

has managed to diminish the personal prestige of the Marshal: his essential ‘impartiality’ remains indisputable. But the effective exercise of this ‘impartiality’ – that is to say, of the real Authority of the Judge – seems to have weakened it (note the unfortunate turn that the Riom trials have taken). The equity of the Marshal’s ‘judgement’ is ‘recognised’, but there is doubt as to the possibility of putting it into practice. (The same attitude prevails in the social sphere: the Marshal is just, but the ‘Trusts’ are much stronger than he is.) It seems therefore that the Marshal cannot (or is no longer able to) found his global authority on the punitive negation of the past (and the present) – that is to say, on the ‘pure’ Authority of the Judge. The total political Authority cannot, therefore, be of the type J ⇨. It is therefore ‘governmental’ Authority (Authority of the Leader and the Master) that must serve as basis for the Authorities of the Father and Judge; and it is the Authority of the Leader that must take precedence in governmental Authority. Total Authority seems thus to be tending towards the type LMFJ (or perhaps LMJF). Note: It seems that, at the moment – leaving aside the question of the future – the Nation is less interested in the equity of the present than in preserving continuity with the totality of the past: it is, indeed, the type (—)FJ and not (—)JF that is at issue here. During the pre-Laval era, political Authority had a tendency to be divided between LJF (the Marshal) and M (the Admiral). We have already seen that the separation between L and M was undesirable. But it seems inevitable, given the age of the Marshal. In any case, the Authority of the Admiral, succeeding the Marshal, was meant to be of the type LMFJ, or perhaps in this case LMJF, this type having a tendency to become, in the case of a war, MLJF. At the present time (May 1942), the total political Authority seems to have three independent ‘supports’: L (Laval), FJ (the Marshal) and M (the Admiral). (Again, the full extent of the actual reciprocal ‘independence’ of these three ‘supports’ is yet to be thought through. But the type of this Authority is difficult to pin down: 1) according to the nation’s hopes, the type is or should be: L+M+FJ; 2) according to personal Authority, the type is indisputably FJ+M+L; 3) a major part of the population believes it has observed with regret that the real power is of the type L+FJ+M. Whatever the case, the hierarchy of ‘supports’ does not coincide with that of Authorities: the Authority of the Leader,

which is supposed to be the strongest, has the weakest ‘support’ of all.) It is therefore the Authority of Leader which seems to serve as the basis for the total political Authority of the Marshal as a consequence of its exercise. And it seems that this Authority of Leader has withstood the test of its effective exercise: even today, a ‘project’ or a ‘programme’ presented by the Marshal would be accepted without any ‘reaction’ owing to the mere fact that he is the person proposing it. Except that the Authority of the Leader, being an Authority of the Future – that is to say, of the ‘project’ – cannot be exerted in the present without an ‘explanation’ – that is to say, without relating present acts to a future defined in and by a political programme. A Leader cannot indefinitely remain Leader without articulating a well-defined ‘project’, a developed ‘programme’ proposing the transformation of the present with a determinate future in mind. But it must be said that, until now, the Marshal has not yet articulated any ‘political programme’ truly worthy of this name (or of the Authority that he still enjoys today). Far from confirming his Authority as Leader, his activity, devoid of a programme known to the nation (and having as a consequence an aspect that is purely ‘opportunistic’), puts a great strain on this Authority. Certainly, the topos, the ‘logical place’ for such a ‘programme’, already exists under the name Révolution nationale. But we must confess that this ‘place’ is still empty. In a second Appendix we shall say a few words about the Révolution nationale. Let us now end this first appendix by saying that the analysis of the Marshal’s Authority leads to the following conclusion: 1. In order for the Révolution nationale to come into being, it needs the Authority of the Marshal: only a ‘programme’ supported by the quadruple Authority of the Marshal stands the chance of being accepted by the nation (if only as a programme). 2. The Authority of the Marshal needs the Révolution nationale (if only in the form of a defined constructive programme – that is to say, of a political ‘idea’) to be able to preserve itself without undergoing any alteration.

Note: We can also say that the Authority of the Marshal represents at the moment a political ideal. But every ideal withers away if it is not realised, or if it does not at least tend towards realising itself. And yet, an ideal that is being realised is called an idea, in the sense of a concrete and constructive idea that generates action, transforming the given in accordance with the ideal (the latter is thus transformed as a result of its realisation no less than the given). The Marshal must therefore cease to be an ideal to become a political idea. This means that he must pronounce and put into practice a programme for a Révolution nationale.

2. REMARKS ON THE RÉVOLUTION NATIONALE

We give the name ‘revolution’ to an active transformation of the political present in accordance with the future; this transformation implies a negation of the given present – that is to say, it is not a simple development of what has already been implied (in an embryonic state) in the latter. (The future must therefore be understood in the strong and proper sense of the term – that is to say, as that which is not yet and which has not already been.) The revolution is ‘national’ when the active transformation of the political present is carried out without any solution of continuity with the totality of the past. (The immediate past can and must be negated, because it is this past that directs the ‘natural’ or ‘automatic’ evolution of the present in a direction different from that which the revolutionary action wants to assign to it.) This definition fixes the ‘framework’ of the Révolution nationale; it indicates its ‘logical place’, its Aristotelian topos. It is a question of giving ‘content’ to this topos. This ‘content’ can be called the ‘revolutionary idea’. The revolutionary idea is a theory or a doctrine (as far as possible, coherent and in principle universal – that is to say, allowing all concrete cases to be ‘deduced’), which can and must generate the action that transforms the political present and creates the political future. The idea triggers action by ‘enunciating’ a project, by indicating a ‘goal’; and it determines and guides action by elaborating a ‘programme’. In order not to be ‘utopian’, this project and this programme must take into account the political present while setting themselves against it: they must be realisable from the point of view of the given present (and not by supposing nonexistent conditions). It must be said that, in May 1942, France does not yet have a revolutionary idea, while accepting the topos of the national Revolution. Note: We generally complain about the fact that the Révolution nationale is not yet realised or completed. But a Revolution is never realised. In so far as something is realised, this something ceases to be revolutionary. Revolution is always something that is being realised, that is in the process of becoming. And what is being realised by the negating

action of the given is precisely the revolutionary idea. One must therefore ‘complain about’ the absence not of a new political reality, but of a revolutionary idea. And it is with the elaboration of this idea that we should begin. I do not make any claim to be able to propose a (national) revolutionary idea to France in 1942. The preceding analyses and deductions are, moreover, not sufficient for doing this. They can at best serve as a starting point for studies capable of leading to the elaboration of such a constructive revolutionary idea. But we can, straightaway, make a very general remark that is, so to speak, of a methodological nature. If we are presented with a ‘revolutionary situation’ – that is to say, if we are standing before a nation ready to abandon a present determined by an immediate past and to contribute to the active (that is to say, creative) realisation of a present that will serve as a foundation for a future different from the one that would have emerged from it without the intervention of the negating action (while remaining attached to the totality of the past), it is in our interest to ‘exploit’ this situation. It can be exploited by presenting the nation with a revolutionary idea. But if we do not yet have such an idea at our disposal (or if for whatever reason we do not want to or cannot enunciate it and put it straightaway into practice), we have to simulate the existence of this idea. A revolutionary situation can be preserved only on condition that it becomes a revolutionary action. The latter is nothing other than the process of realisation of the revolutionary idea. Without idea, there is no revolutionary action properly speaking – that is to say, no creation of a truly new political reality. But a simulacrum of an idea can generate a simulacrum of a revolutionary action, and this pseudorevolutionary activity can contribute towards the preservation (for a certain time) of the revolutionary situation (without which no true revolutionary action is possible). In order not to lapse back into ‘inertia’ (that is to say, the ‘automatic prolongation’ of the immediate past, via the present, into the future), the nation must at least have the impression that it is acting in accordance with a revolutionary idea. And it is this impression that the presence of the simulacrum of the idea must produce.

A ‘simulacrum’ preserves the ‘form’ while changing or eliminating the ‘content’. It is therefore a question of presenting the nation with political forms that have a revolutionary appearance, while attributing an ‘inoffensive’ content to them: that is to say, either no content at all, or one that is non-revolutionary, i.e., one that is compatible with the present given (with the given division of political forces and possibilities). In other words, a new type of State or political Authority has to be created (because a Revolution is nothing other than the replacement of one given type of Authority with another), even if we have to make the new institutions work ‘in neutral’, without any real efficacy, reserving the possibility of replacing them (without any serious resistance) with others if the real revolutionary action of the future requires this. It would seem easier to find such a simulacrum of a national revolutionary idea than to propose this idea itself. I do not make any claim even to propose such a ‘simulacrum’ of a revolutionary idea, but it seems to me that the preceding analyses and deductions can – provided that they are discussed and further elaborated – contribute to its development. Let us see, by way of a simple example, what political form (‘Constitution’) a State realising a political Authority of the type LM–F–J (total, but divided into three) would have. Note: We shall not specify the relations between Authorities F and J. In other words, no clear distinction between the ‘variants’ LM–F–J and LM– J–F will be provided. The Authority LM is ‘governmental’ Authority. The global political Authority (the State) being of the L ⇨ type, it is the Government that is prevalent here. In other words, it is from the Government that the initiatives proceed. Within governmental Authority, it is Authority L that prevails. Supposing that Authority LM has an individual support, this only means that the Government is inspired by (or claims to be inspired by) primarily the revolutionary idea – that is to say the Future – and not by the interests of the day (military force must be at the service of this ‘civil’ Future rather than seeking to determine it). The support of the Authority

LM being individual, the person of the Head of State is Leader of the Government (Authority L), as well as Leader of the army (Authority M): but, if need arises, he is supposed to wage war in order to be able to govern, and not to govern to be able, at any cost, to wage war. The Head of State transmits (delegates) his ‘governmental’ (civil and military) Authority by nomination (though he does not nominate his successor). He nominates his State Secretaries by himself. The latter enjoy Authority L (‘legislative’), and are required to elaborate the details (concrete applications) of the revolutionary idea (to draft legislation, and so on). He nominates respectively the Ministers who enjoy the benefits of the Authority M (‘executive’), and who must realise the projects of the State Secretaries who nominated them. These Ministers also nominate their respective Civil Servants. The Authority of the Head of State is generated spontaneously. It is ‘manifested’ by the vote of confidence of a Manifestant Assembly (whose members have been nominated by its predecessor), which can only refuse this vote without being able to propose another candidate. This same Assembly ‘confirms’ the Authority of the State Secretaries, the Ministers and the main Civil Servants (after having spent three, six and twelve months exercising their functions, respectively), still without having any power to propose their own candidates for these posts. Besides the Secretaries of State, the Head of State nominates two State Ministers not ‘confirmed’ by the Assembly. One of them is given the responsibility of representing the Government before the Senate–censor – that is to say, of putting to the vote laws elaborated by the State Secretaries and accepted by the Head of State. His role is to provide the Senate with the necessary explanations. The other has the responsibility of a liaising agent between the Government and the political Tribunal, acting as (political) public prosecutor, in cases where the Government (or the Senate??) wishes to bring someone before the Tribunal. The Senate–censor (which nominates if need arises the Censor–civil servants) is constituted by representatives (elected by a series of successive votes) of all Heads of Families possessing a landed inheritance. It will be given the responsibility of ensuring that the (revolutionary) legislative activity of the Government does not interrupt the continuity with political Tradition. It can reject a law but not propose any.

The political Tribunal presides over cases of high treason – that is to say, acts liable either to change the type of State, or to compromise the future of the nation. Its judgement is guided only by the ‘political conscience’ of the judges, who can choose between ‘distinction’ and the death penalty. (It can rule on its own incompetence??) The members of the Tribunal are elected by universal suffrage (= selected at random) among all citizens (men and women politically adult and politically healthy). The Tribunal can nominate, if need arises, ‘tribunes’ or judges– civil servants. It does not take the initiative of pronouncing a judgement, that is to say, making an accusation. (Practically, it does not intervene except in the case of a severe conflict between the head of state and the State Secretaries supported by the State Minister.) This structure of the State takes into consideration only the phenomenon of ‘Authority’, overlooking completely the phenomenon of ‘Work’. And yet both must be taken into account. The State founded on Work (see brief article on work)1 implies a hierarchical corporate organism. Every political Authority is generated from within Corporations. It is therefore the Supreme Council of urban corporations (peasant corporations emanating politically from the Senate) that proposes the candidate for the function of Head of State. And it is from among the candidates proposed by this Council that the Head of State chooses his Secretaries of State, who in turn choose the Ministers, these Ministers then choosing the Civil Servants. In so far as the external situation makes it impossible to do without an Army, the State must be founded not only on Work, but also on ‘Risk’ – that is to say, on military power. Consequently, the Army must share in political authority. The candidate for the post of head of state must therefore be proposed in concert by the supreme Council of Corporations and by the supreme Council of the Army. And it is from among the candidates they propose that the Head of State chooses a State Secretary for war (and for the colonies??). During peacetime, it is the candidate of the Council or Corporations (approved by the Council of the Army) who presents himself before the Manifestant Assembly in order to obtain a vote of confidence. In time of war (or a danger of war), it is the candidate proposed by the Council of the Army who presents himself as a candidate (after being approved by the Council of Corporations). Let us note that governmental Authority is of the LM type in peacetime and of

the ML type in wartime. The danger of potential war can be certified by the Manifestant Assembly, and this should result in the resignation of the civil leader and the presentation of the military candidate. But the assembly cannot deny the danger of possible war certified by the Government, which must lead to the resignation of its Leader in so far as he is not already a military man. The state of peace is decided by the military Head of the State, who must as a consequence of this statement give up his position to the civil candidate. Six months after the cessation of hostilities, or one year after a year of possible war danger without actual hostilities, the senate can certify the state of peace, and by this statement make the military Head of State resign. But the assembly can, despite its statement, also certify a state of war. The final word to decide upon the definitive statement lies with the Tribunal. A. Kojevnikoff Marseille, 16 May 1942 1 [This could be a reference to a study that has not been found in Kojève’s papers (yet), but it is

also possible that this study was integrated in his Phenomenology of Right, which includes substantial passages on work from a juridical perspective.]