On authority: a discussion between Foucault and Arendt.

Edgar Straehle

University of Barcelona

edgarstraehle@gmail.com

In recent times, the concept of authority has increasingly been considered as

tantamount to power and even to authoritarianism. I claim that the question of power
has attracted so much attention in recent decades that it has overshadowed other issues,
such as the question of authority and its political, philosophical and historical specificity.
For this reason, I vindicate that in the past authority carried a certain dimension that has
been obliterated and, in my opinion, such oblivion has impoverished the current political
vocabulary and the way we understand politics. The spread of the confusion between
power and authority favored a tendency to observe and interpret political phenomena
exclusively from the language and frame of power. According to some views, it is
impossible to conceive or imagine the existence of something beyond or outside power.
Power covers everything and is defined by its ubiquity, as if it were impossible to find an
alternative that was qualitatively different. Each alternative, thus, would merely be another
face of power, but one of opposite sign. This explains that in our times expressions such as
limitation of powers, separation of powers, counter-power or soft power are constantly
repeated, speaking always in terms of power and forgetting for example the ancient
dimension of authority. One of the main goals of this talk is to problematize the
relationship between power and authority.

I do not have time in these pages to display in depth what and how authority has
been understood in the past. As with many other words, besides, the history of this
concept is full of important and countless semantic changes, distortions, confusions,
interpretations, contradictions or political appropriations. In fact, we must concede that
authority has often been a politicized and instrumentalized concept, narrowly interwoven
with the corresponding political conflicts. On the other hand, institutions of power have
often been tempted and have attempted to present themselves also as institutions of
authority. It is, therefore, very complicated or almost impossible to clearly dissociate or
disentangle both the concepts power and authority.

Being aware of this question, Arendt fought against these abuses of the concept of
power and, subsequently, she vindicated and tried to rethink the concept of authority in its
specificity. She intended to rediscover its original meaning and to grasp its ancient political
dimension, trying to go beyond the bellicose frame of power, violence and domination.
Obviously, she did not want to essentialize authority and did not intend to restore its
ancient and lost face. Arendt was also aware of the historical and relational aspect of this
neglected concept and she only wanted to recapture its forgotten dimension.

Arendt admitted that authority was a kind of asymmetric relationship but she also
claimed that, ideally, authority precludes any use of external means of imposition, coercion
or violence. According to this position, authority is sustained by a combination of mixed
and interrelated factors such as legitimacy, reputation, prestige, ascendancy, respect, trust,
consent or a recognition which is given by the others. Unlike power, this assymetry cannot
be forced or imposed and must be allowed or accepted by these others. That is, authority
depends ultimately not on itself but on the others and emerges as a kind of concession.
Authority is, so to speak, something that has to come from the outside and never from the
inside. Due to its dependence on the recognition of others, authority is also compatible
with freedom, spontaneity and it always entails the possibility of being rejected or revoked.
For this reason, authority is defined by its intrinsic and inevitable inappropriability, by a
constitutive frailty or precariousness. These others are not only the people who can
undermine, limit or invalidate someones authority; they are also the condition of possibility
for the existence of any kind of authority. This explains the ambivalence of authority: those
who are the basis of its existence are the same ones who can suppress or revoke it.

In addition, the existence of authority reveals the indigent character and the
ineradicable incompleteness of power. A power devoid of authority, sustained only on itself
or on the means of violence, is condemned to be disobeyed, contested, challenged and
finally overthrown in the future. Insofar as it aims to present itself as legitimate and wants
to avoid conflicts, power cannot withdraw into itself and thus requires the endowment of
authority, a support which rests on the recognition of the people. Authority can reinforce,
legitimate or authorize power, but can also discredit, denounce or disallow it. Without
authority, power runs the risk of being considered as a naked power, as authoritarianism,
despotism, tyranny or something worse.

Therefore, Arendts account of authority is directed against the modern concept of

sovereignty, which was defined by Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes by being supreme,
indivisible, indisputable and absolute. That is a sort of power which pretends to authorize
itself or intends to include the dimension of authority within itself. With this movement,
power usurps authority and emerges as a kind of conflation between power and authority.
From that moment on, power and authority became words that, to this day, have often
been used interchangeably. Besides, both words were vindicated as a monopoly owned by
the state. Rephrasing Max Weber, we could say that the state vindicated not only the
monopoly of legitimate power or violence (Gewalt) but of legitimate authority, too. Thus,
power, just because it is in power, has to be acknowledged as the sole authority and,
conversely, the sole authority is by definition the sovereign power.

First of all, I have to say that it is very complicated to establish a dialogue between
Arendt and Foucault, because both philosophers wrote from a very different perspective.
My purpose, thus, lies not in making a real comparison between them. Rather, I intend to
use the writings of both philosophers in order to enrich and shed light on the question of
authority.

Certainly, I have to add that in the writings of Michel Foucault. I do not find any
substantial difference between power and authority. In my opinion, it is not possible to
find such concept as the arendtian authority either. On the one hand, Foucault did not pay
special attention to the concept of authority in its specificity. In fact, he explicitly
disregarded this concept in his course at the College de France Psychiatric Power, where he
deemed that authority was no more than a psychosociological question.

On the other hand, we have to take into consideration that foucaltian model of
power seems to be incompatible with Arendts account of authority. As is known, Foucault
claimed that power is not an institution [or] a structure, nor an individual capacity, but
rather a complex arrangement of forces in society. He conceived power as a multiple set of
force relations, immanent processes by which these relations are transformed, systems or
disjunctions that are constituted by the interplay of these force relations. For this reason, as
Arendts authority, power is relational and it is not possessed, but exercised. Power cannot
be an exclusive property of a minority. It is omnipresent and is to be found everywhere. In
fact, power is always accompanied by resistance (resistance that is exerted by others). As
Foucault stated, in the relations of power, there is necessarily the possibility of resistance,
for if there were no possibility of resistance - of violent resistance, of escape, of ruse, of
strategies that reverse the situation - there would be no relations of power. Whereas in
Arendts thinking resistance (or antagonism, opposition and violence) entails the
breakdown of authority, Foucaults account of power is not only compatible with
resistance. Actually, both concepts, power and counter-power, are interdependent and
entwined. I think that here lies the crux of the matter.

Foucault also depicted other kind of powers which try to go beyond violence and
where the question of resistance and counter-power becomes more subtle and less visible. I
am referring to the pastoral power or to the modern governmentality, which infiltrate
deeply and persistently into the lives of individuals and are related to fields such as
pedagogy, disciplines, normalization, bio-power and knowledge. Anyway, regardless of its
non-physical violence or its subtlety, these kinds of power reproduce a scheme that
ultimately coincides with domination and that is not a concession given by the others.
Arendt wanted to change the point of view of the question and her philosophical challenge
was how can we think or articulate a kind of power which depends not on itself but, ideally,
on the consented, spontaneous and free acknowledgment conferred by others

Despite this, it does not mean that it is not possible to find some traces in
Foucaults philosophy that share important traits with Arendts concept of authority. In
fact, that power is everywhere does not mean that all relations consist of nothing other
than power relations (needless to say, the same thing applies to Arendts authority).

In the remaining time I will focus on the last two courses of Michel Foucault at the
College de France (The Government of Self and Others and The Courage of Truth), which are
devoted to the question of parrhesia. As is known, parrhesia means literally to speak
everything and by extension to speak freely or to speak boldly. Parrhesia implies not
only freedom of speech, but the obligation to speak the truth for the common good, even
at personal risk. For this reason, parrhesia turned into an indispensable institution for the
good functioning of the Athenian democracy. Both parrhesia and democracy were
interdependent.
 I want to remark that parrhesia is at least doubly related to the question of authority.
First of all, parrhesia is described as a kind of discourse practice that can tell the truth to
political power. In this sense, parrhesia shows how the non-violent power of words can
challenge and undermine powers authority by denouncing its manipulations, injustices,
repressions or deceptions. In doing so, parrhesia can discredit and call into question the
government in power by revealing, for instance, its lack of authority or provoking it.

Besides, Foucault explains that this parrhesia was linked to isegoria and that both were
the fundamental backbones of the true democracy. However, although parrhesia and
democracy are two sides of the same coin, they are also at odds with each other. As is
known, isegoria was the statutory right to speak and entailed that each citizen had the equal
right to give his opinion and to vote. On the contrary, parrhesia allows a certain ascendancy
of some over others. Actually, the word ascendancy, repeated once and again throughout
the text, can be considered as one of the key terms of the course The Government of Self and
Others.

In one crucial passage of this course said Foucault:

There can only be true discourse, the free play of true discourse, and access to true
discourse for everybody where there is democracy. However, and this is where the relationship
between true discourse and democracy becomes difficult and problematic, it has to be understood
that true discourse is not and cannot be distributed equally in a democracy according to the form of
isegoria. Not everybody can tell the truth just because everybody may speak. True discourse
introduces a difference or rather is linked, both in its conditions and in its effects, to a difference:
only a few can tell the truth. And once only a few can tell the truth, once this truth-telling has
emerged into the field of democracy, a difference is produced which is that of the ascendancy
exercised by some over others.

Foucault was completely aware of this paradox or conflict. There could only be true
discourse through the egalitarian structure of democracy, but true discourse (the parrhesia)
introduced something completely different and irreducible to the egalitarian structure of
democracy. Thus, in this course we find sketched or reformulated anew, here in the frame
of the Athenian democracy, what Arendt considered at the end of her book On Revolution as
one of the most serious challenges of all modern politics: that is, the conflictive, but not
contradictory, relationship between equality and the asymmetry of authority (here under
the name of ascendancy) or the problem between the ideal and the factual situation of
democracy. The hidden problem that is to be found in this context is: is it possible to
reconcile horizontality with asymmetry? And equality and freedom with asymmetry?

As Arendt, Foucault did never answer to this question. Actually, this was not his
purpose. He simply tackled the question of parrhesia and its consequences throughout the
history of Athens. Anyway, Foucault made clear that it is important to separate the
ascendancy inherent to parrhesia from an asymmetric and oppressive kind of government
such as tyranny, and this difference lies mostly in the role played by isegoria.

- First of all, he specified that parrhesia does not exclude others and allows (but not
forces) them to speak freely. Isegoria merely defines and establishes the constitutional
and institutional framework in which parrhesia will function as the free activity of some
who come forward and speak.

- Secondly, Foucault underlined that each one of the citizens can hold this kind of word.
Parrhesia was allegedly inclusive and was not based on the status of the person but on
his or her courage. Parrhesia is also open to people who lack power. Thus, its superiority
is not at all identical to that of a tyrant, who exercises power without rivals, and this
superiority can be revoked without violence. In addition, the superiority connected to
parrhesia is a superiority shared with others, but shared in the form of competition,
rivalry, conflict, and duel. It is an agonistic structure.

- Thirdly, parrhesiastic utterances are not authoritarian but persuasive or even authoritative
(and I know that I am using a word that, obviously, Foucault did not used basically
because this ambiguous term, linked to the old meaning of authority, does not properly
exist in French). No one is obliged to believe or to follow the content or the claims of
the speakers. There is a commitment between logos and truth that the demos can consider
trustworthy (parrhesiastic) or not. Ultimately, the effectiveness of parrhesia reposes on its
reception by listeners or spectators. As Arendtian authority, being considered as
parrhesiastic depends on a kind of recognition or acknowledgment that cannot be
imposed to the others. For this reason, Foucault clarifies that, in spite of being a
discourse spoken from above, parrhesia is different from the pure and simple exercise
of power.
 After these considerations, Foucault redirects his attention to the decline of the
good parrhesia as a logos alethes (the discourse of truth) and its replacement by flattery,
manipulation and demagoguery as the bad parrhesia. This decline led to Platos criticism to
democracy and the change of meaning of the parrhesia. The figure of Socrates as the ideal
embodiment of parrhesia allows a new connection between parrhesia and truth but becomes
incompatible with the preservation of democracy.

In the following and last course, The Courage of the Truth, Foucault developed further
the question of parrhesia, especially in the context of the Cynics and their scandalous
behavior, but all of sudden the word ascendancy disappears and receives not a single
mention in the whole book. In their own way, without doctrinal mediation, they provide a
transgressor form of life. As Foucault states, cynicism is not satisfied with establishing a
correspondence, a harmony or homophony between a certain type of discourse and a life
conforming to the principles stated in that discourse. They link mode of life and truth in a
much tighter and more precise way. They make the form of existence a way of making
truth itself visible in ones acts, ones body, the way one dresses, and in the way one
conducts oneself and lives. Therefore, they contest what Foucault describes as a
traditionality of doctrine, but provide another kind of traditionality, the so-called
traditionality of existence. This kind of traditionality consists in memories of anecdotes
and episodes of their founding fathers (like Crates and Diogenes, p. 209) that, recalled by
their disciples, become exemplar, authoritative and have to be imitated, not in a close and
restrictive way. In this sense, the Cynics appear as counter-authorities that challenge the
statu quo and allow exploring new paths of transformation.