Article EJPT

European Journal of Political Theory

2014, Vol 13(1) 25–40
Gadamer and political ! The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885112473722
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George Duke
Deakin University, Australia

Abstract
The rehabilitation of the concept of authority is one of the more contentious positions
advocated by Gadamer in Truth and Method (1960). Habermas in particular challenged
the universality of Gadamer’s hermeneutic project by presenting this rehabilitation as a
conservative legitimation of prevailing prejudices which truncates the role of critical
reflection. Given that Gadamer’s primary focus is upon the ramifications of the
Enlightenment dichotomy between reason and authority for historical hermeneutics,
however, and that his examples are drawn primarily from educational domains, the
extent to which his account of authority sustains a political interpretation is far from
self-evident. In this article I argue that Gadamer’s account can nonetheless make at least
two important contributions to contemporary philosophical debates on political
authority. Following a brief exposition of Gadamer’s account of authority in Truth and
Method, I examine his suggestion that the basis of legitimate political authority is to be
found in the normative status of the right to be authoritative, rather than in the factual
status of being in a position of authority. This account, I suggest, places in question the
abstract dichotomy between theoretical and practical authority which informs much
contemporary debate on political authority. I then demonstrate how Gadamer’s empha-
sis upon the historicity of tradition offers important insights for discussions of the
relation between political authority and moral autonomy.

Keywords
authority, Gadamer, hermeneutics, moral autonomy, tradition

Introduction
The rehabilitation of the concept of authority is one of the more contentious pos-
itions advocated by Gadamer in Truth and Method (1960). Habermas in particular
challenged the universality of Gadamer’s hermeneutic project by presenting this
rehabilitation as a conservative legitimation of prevailing prejudices which

Corresponding author:
George Duke, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University,
Melbourne Campus at Burwood, 221 Burwood Hwy, 3125, Australia.
Email: george.duke@deakin.edu.au
26 European Journal of Political Theory 13(1)

truncates the role of critical reflection.1 Given that Gadamer’s primary focus is
upon the ramifications of the Enlightenment dichotomy between reason and
authority for historical hermeneutics, however, and that his examples are drawn
primarily from educational domains, the extent to which his account of authority
sustains a political interpretation is far from self-evident. In this article I argue that
Gadamer’s account can nonetheless make at least two important contributions to
contemporary philosophical debates on political authority. Following a brief
exposition in section 1 of Gadamer’s account of authority in Truth and Method,
in section 2 I examine his suggestion that the basis of legitimate political authority
is to be found in the normative status of the right to be authoritative, rather than in
the factual status of being in a position of authority. This account, I suggest, places
in question the abstract dichotomy between theoretical and practical authority
which informs much contemporary debate on political authority. In section 3 I
then demonstrate how Gadamer’s emphasis upon the historicity of tradition offers
important insights for discussions of the relation between political authority and
moral autonomy.

1. Gadamer’s account of authority

Gadamer’s discussion of authority in Truth and Method sets out from what he
regards as one of the central questions for historical hermeneutics, namely how
prejudices (Vorurteile) can be legitimated.2 In attacking the Enlightenment ‘preju-
dice against prejudice’, Gadamer reappropriates the term ‘prejudice’, using it to
describe the prejudgements that are necessary enabling conditions of our under-
standing. Gadamer’s main target is the Enlightenment tendency to set up a sim-
plistic dichotomy between authority and reason. Kant’s well-known claim at the
beginning of ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (1784) that submission to the authority of
another and reluctance to use one’s own rationality is indicative of a lack of
maturity is exemplary of this tendency. Enlightenment thinkers, Gadamer notes,
tend to distinguish between prejudices that arise due to impatience and those based
on submission to authority,3 with the latter category of prejudice in turn charac-
terized as an inability or reluctance to use one’s own reason. The Enlightenment,
somewhat paradoxically, thus promotes the submission of all authority to reason.
Due to its indiscriminate rejection of the concept, the Enlightenment overlooked
the possibility that the prejudices taken up on the basis of authority could also be
sources of truth.4 In other words, the Enlightenment goes astray for Gadamer in its
identification of prejudice (Vorurteil) with bias (Befangenheit), for such identifica-
tion is only legitimate in cases where prejudices are unjustified.5
It is not possible to consider in detail here the complexities of the Gadamer–
Habermas debate on the role of critical reflection in relation to authority and
tradition,6 Gadamer is unequivocal, however, that there are countless ‘bad’ preju-
dices that need to be overcome through rational critique.7 The question is thus not
whether critical reflection has a role to play in overcoming bad prejudices, but
rather the grounds that allow us to distinguish the good from the bad. At this
point Gadamer seems to face the following difficulty. Insofar as our prejudices are
Duke 27

given to us by tradition – and hence taken over more or less unconsciously or on

the basis of trust – normative sources of justification for such critical discrimination
appear to be lacking. Gadamer’s answer is that the prejudices handed down by
tradition serve not only as enabling and orienting conditions of understanding, but
also as the basis for further questioning. Prejudices are legitimated, then, when we
ground for ourselves the finite, historically and linguistically conditioned truth that
is handed down to us by our tradition.
Gadamer suggests that the Enlightenment distorted the concept of authority
by equating it with deference to prevailing traditions – blind obedience and sub-
mission of one’s own judgement to that of another8 – thereby stigmatizing it as
inherently opposed to reason. The canonical early modern articulation of this
viewpoint is Hobbes’s dictum that auctoritas non veritas facit legem and asso-
ciated claim that it is pre-eminently the will of the sovereign rather than the
content of what they command that makes the law. This viewpoint anticipates
in important ways the contemporary thesis that political authority entails con-
tent-independent and peremptory reasons for action.9 Taken to its extreme, this
account of authority seems to entail that one should follow the commands of a
superior simply because they have been commanded by that superior and not
because of the merits of the case. Gadamer admits that the identification of
authority with this ‘command’ conception seems consistent with the fact that
authority is generally attributed to persons in positions of power.10 According
to Gadamer, however, genuine authority has less to do with blind obedience than
with recognition and knowledge. Authority is attributable to persons to the
extent that other persons recognize the initial persons to be superior in know-
ledge, insight and experience. Authority is thus something that has to be earned
by its possessor and bestowed by those subject to its demands. Even in explicitly
political contexts, it is ‘an act of freedom and reason that grants the authority of
a superior fundamentally because he has a wider view of things or is better
informed i.e.. . . because he knows more’.11
Genuine authority for Gadamer is thus intimately linked to knowledge and
truth. The way we can distinguish good (legitimate) and bad (illegitimate) preju-
dices is on the basis of the facts of the matter (die Sache) or the things them-
selves, in the sense that the authority of the expert is derivative from their
superior understanding of, or access to, a particular subject matter or content12–
rather than the arbitrary decision of any particular agent. This explains why
Gadamer’s main examples of authorities are the teacher and the expert. Whilst
traditions and prejudices (in the positive sense) are legitimated through the
authority of the teacher and the expert, the primary source of their legitimacy
is their truth, a truth that is finite and historically conditioned but nonetheless
amenable to rational demonstration.13 Contrary to the Hobbesian theory out-
lined above, Gadamer thus suggests that an authority is legitimate when it pro-
vides us with content-dependent reasons, i.e. reasons which reflect facts of the
matter that precede and should condition the directives of those in positions of
authority. The ground of legitimate authority for Gadamer, in other words, is the
understanding of a commonly accessible content or truth that provides a
28 European Journal of Political Theory 13(1)

normative justification for those who have privileged access to that content or
truth to serve as authorities in a particular domain. It is in this sense that
Gadamerian authority undermines the existence of a sharp divide between the-
oretical and political authority.14 It also implicitly entails a rejection of key
premises of both crude legal positivism and decisionism.15
It is helpful at this point to consider why Gadamer’s account should not be
taken to imply an assimilation or reduction of practical authority to theoretical
authority. Such an assimilation or reduction would be problematic for
Gadamer on at least two levels. In the first instance, the hermeneutics of
understanding developed by Gadamer throughout Truth and Method explicitly
rejects the assimilation of the kind of applied practical knowledge operative in
interpretation and the ethical and political realms to either theoretical or tech-
nical knowledge. Secondly, from a purely conceptual point of view, such an
assimilation or reduction seems to ignore the salient differences between the-
oretical and practical authority. The second concern will be the theme of
section 2, but it is worth first briefly considering the apparent tension between
Gadamer’s account of authority as just outlined and his universalized hermen-
eutics of understanding.
The tension in question can be brought out by the following. Gadamer sug-
gests that the legitimacy of authority presupposes the free and rational acknow-
ledgement of those subject to it regarding the truth of a particular subject matter.
One might think here of a classics lecturer asserting that Plato frequently uses the
instrumental dative before it has been established independently by her students.
The students (should) acknowledge the authority of the teacher on the basis of
the teacher’s superior knowledge, but there exists the capacity for the teacher’s
assertions to be tested through recourse to a ‘proof’ procedure (reading several
Platonic dialogues in Ancient Greek), one which can in principle be verified by
any of the students and is verifiable independently of the claims to authority of
any particular individual. This authority may be considered as theoretical, insofar
as it provides reasons for belief, but certainly not insofar as it suggests a subject
matter to be known as a fixed object of theoretical contemplation or technical
control. This is precisely one of the ways in which Gadamer distinguishes the
kind of knowledge sought by the human sciences in contrast to the methodo-
logical approach of the natural sciences. Rather it is the case for Gadamer that
we should think of understanding as a kind of practical knowledge (phronesis)
which has a ‘productive’ component made explicit in application. For Gadamer,
that is, ‘understanding is not, in fact, understanding better, either in the sense of
superior knowledge of the subject because of clearer ideas or in the sense of
fundamental superiority of conscious over unconscious production’.16 It is mis-
leading, from this point of view, to speak of an object of knowledge, insofar as
this suggests that such an object could exist independently of the horizon and
interests of the investigator.
Gadamer’s account of legitimate authority, moreover, can be reconciled with his
universalized hermeneutics by appeal to the role it attributes to normative frame-
works of shared language and tradition. Consider a more substantive
Duke 29

interpretation of a classical text. From the perspective of Gadamer’s hermeneutics,

a classical text contains possibilities of understanding that speak to us from the
vantage point of our own horizon. It is nonetheless clear that an expert in classical
philology has access to aspects of the text which are not so easily accessible to the
non-expert. The classical philologist has a justified claim to authority in the sense
that she is able to open our eyes to aspects of the text that might otherwise be
concealed from our view. This form of understanding is neither technical nor
purely theoretical or contemplative, however, for it involves the application of
understanding to a determinate linguistic context. Skill in application implies
experience and insight, not simply expertise. And the genuinely insightful and
experienced person, for Gadamer, is one who has developed historically effected
consciousness, i.e. who understands their situatedness within a particular historical
and linguistic tradition and hence accepts the finitude and limitations of human
knowledge.17
Whilst the comparison of authority in the realm of classical interpretation with
political authority should obviously not be overstated, there is one key structural
similarity. When we are engaged in political discussion and decision our concern is
neither with pure contemplation nor with unreflective action. Rather we deliberate
in order to act in the right way in concrete circumstances. Moreover, according to
Gadamer’s account, we demonstrate ‘superior’ insight and judgement not just
through displaying our knowledge of the facts of the matter, but also through
an undogmatic openness to the limitations of our expertise and hence preparedness
to acknowledge the possibility that we may be mistaken.18 This way of looking at
matters undermines the existence of a sharp divide between reasons for belief and
reasons for action because it works with a conception of understanding which
traverses these different kinds of justification.
By suggesting that legitimate authority consists in the normative status of the
right to be authoritative, rather than the factual status of being in a position of
authority, Gadamer thus not only places in question the command theory preva-
lent since Hobbes, he offers material for a reappropriation of an alternative
account of political authority. One significant passage in Truth and Method in
this context is Gadamer’s discussion of Vico’s notion of sensus communis.19
Gadamer suggests that Vico’s sensus communis should be regarded less as a cog-
nitive faculty than as the shared sense that founds community.20 According to
Vico, Gadamer says, ‘what gives the human will its direction is not the abstract
universality of reason but the concrete universality represented by the community
of a group, a people, a nation of the whole human race’.21 What we are concerned
with here is a kind of ethical knowledge that is directed towards the practical
situation and which provides the basis for the concrete form of universality embo-
died in customs and laws. Like phronesis, the sensus communis represents a form of
intellectual virtue, a distinctive ethical disposition, but one that is practically ori-
ented by the need to act well in concrete situations that are necessarily subject to
change. The key insight here for our purposes is the identification of a form of
action-guiding knowledge which is neither purely theoretical nor concerned with
reasons for action in abstraction from content.
30 European Journal of Political Theory 13(1)

2. On the distinction between theoretical and practical

authority
My primary aim in this section is to explore in more detail the suggestion of the
previous section that Gadamer’s account of authority places in question the exist-
ence of a rigid conceptual dichotomy between practical and theoretical authority.
The best way to begin this exploration is by addressing an obvious concern about
the political consequences of Gadamer’s position.
Gadamer’s claim that authority is attributed to persons on the basis of superior
knowledge and insight seems to raise difficult questions concerning the normative
sources of legitimate exercise of political power. Although Gadamer does not expli-
citly assimilate political to theoretical authority, his primary focus upon the prob-
lems of hermeneutics nonetheless leads him to conceptualize authority in the
context of educational domains where there are clear claims on behalf of the rele-
vant authorities to possess superior judgement and insight based upon knowledge
of the facts of the matter (die Sache). Political leaders in liberal democratic parlia-
mentary regimes may rely upon the advice of scientific or policy experts, but we do
not tend to think of them as in possession of superior insight or knowledge. With
Habermas’s critique in mind, how are we to ensure that the truth-claims of political
authorities do not embody an ideological concealment of real oppression?
Something of what is at stake is captured in Arendt’s observation that

. . . nothing is more questionable than the political relevance of examples drawn from
the field of education . . . wherever the model of education through authority . . . was
superimposed on the realm of politics (and this has happened often enough and still is
a mainstay of conservative argument), it served primarily to obscure real or coveted
claims to rule and pretended to educate while in reality it wanted to dominate.22

Arendt’s point is that we can only assume that political authority has an educa-
tional character on the highly implausible assumption that those who exercise
power possess genuine wisdom. Yet such an assumption seems to suggest not
only an uncritical privileging of the claims of tradition and extant prejudices attrib-
uted to Gadamer by Habermas, but also an illegitimate authoritarianism based on
unverifiable claims of superior access to the truth. Consideration of this concern
can allow us a vantage point from which to assess the intelligibility of Gadamer’s
attempt to found authority in the normative status of the right to be authoritative,
rather than the factual status of being in a position of authority.
Arendt’s statement regarding the irrelevance of examples drawn from the
domain of education to political authority expresses a legitimate concern, but
nonetheless assumes the very divide between practical and theoretical authority
which Gadamer’s account places in question. The conceptual basis of this distinc-
tion has been well captured by Friedman in his account of the difference between
someone being ‘in authority’ and being ‘an authority’. Someone is ‘in’ a position of
authority if they occupy ‘some office, position or status which entitles them to make
decisions about how other people should behave’.23 A person is ‘an authority’, by
Duke 31

contrast, insofar as they express utterances or beliefs that are ‘entitled to be

believed’.24 The presuppositions of the two notions, which map onto the notions
of political and theoretical authority, are quite distinct.25 In the case of someone ‘in
authority’, theoretical justification can in principle be waived insofar as the very
fact that a prescription comes from a specific person is seen as sufficient reason for
obedience, i.e. someone ‘in authority’ has a right to command and be obeyed
independently of the content of the commands that they issue. As Friedman sug-
gests, the modern notion of political authority is understood primarily on this
model. Friedman also notes, however, that the distinction is far from unproblem-
atic; we not only speak of teachers, parents and experts as having authority over
beliefs, we also attribute such authority to legislators, judges and generals, i.e. in
explicitly political contexts.26 We also tend to place in question the moral legitim-
acy of an authority that issues arbitrary commands without external justification.
Contemporary accounts of political authority generally assume the distinction
between theoretical and practical authority encapsulated in Friedman’s analysis.
Theoretical authority provides reasons for belief, practical authority reasons for
action. The former is identified with the privileged epistemic position of the teacher
or scientific expert, the latter employed to explain political authority. The distinc-
tion can be schematized as follows:
(TA) ¼X has theoretical authority over Y if as a consequence of X stating that ,
Y has a reason to believe that 
(PA) ¼X has practical authority over Y if as a consequence of X stating that Y
should , Y has a reason to act in such a way that brings about 27
A stronger version of PA asserts that a command by X that Y should  con-
stitutes a reason that cancels out or excludes other reasons for action:
(PA1) ¼X has practical authority over Y if as a consequence of X stating that Y
should , Y has a reason to bring about  which excludes other reasons to
 or not-
Both PA and PA1 are triadic social relations involving a superior, a subject and
an action. When contemporary theorists talk of political authority, they generally
have in mind the stronger relation represented by PA1.28
Gadamer’s analysis of authority relations allows for a placing in question of the
sharp distinction between theoretical and practical authority suggested by this
schematism. This is because it suggests that the normative basis of legitimate
authority rests upon acknowledgement that someone is in a better position – not
just in an epistemic sense, but also in that they have superior insight and experience
in the sense outlined in section 1 – to assess the relevant state of affairs than
ourselves. The basis of legitimate political authority, on this view, is found in the
normative status of the right to be authoritative, rather than the factual status of
being in a position of authority. Someone legitimately occupies a position of pol-
itical authority on this Gadamerian model only if (i) they allow the subjects of
authority to act better in accordance with the reasons that apply to them than they
would without the guidance offered by that authority and (ii) there is recognition
32 European Journal of Political Theory 13(1)

by the subjects of this state of affairs. It is the recognition requirement which

renders problematic the abstraction of reasons for action from reasons for belief
suggested by PA and PA1.
An example of the explanatory power of this account in a practical context is
instructive. Military procedures set down conditions which authorize a military
commander with a generic right to issue orders to those falling under his or her
command. It would nonetheless be misleading to assert that these orders are based
solely in the institutional position of the commander as someone entitled to direct
action. They are necessarily embedded within a complex social practice of belief
and recognition. If a military commander continually issues orders that are com-
pletely irrelevant to the situation or perverse, then this is rightly classified as an
abuse of authority. Likewise, if a military commander issues orders that are con-
sistently mistaken from a strategic perspective, then the legitimacy of their author-
ity would begin to be placed in question. This example, surely paradigmatic for the
notion of practical authority, demonstrates that rule-following is never completely
independent of the substance or content of the rules in play. By emphasizing the
role that acknowledgement plays in legitimate authority relations, Gadamer’s
account thus places in question the idea that we can speak of reasons for action
in complete abstraction from reasons for belief.
Support for Gadamer’s account of authority relations can be found from an at
first sight unlikely source. Although Joseph Raz’s account of exclusionary reasons
for action conforms to the account of practical authority relations I have sketched,
his dependence thesis demonstrates the difficulty of upholding a rigid separation
between theoretical and practical authority. The dependence thesis asserts that ‘all
authoritative directives should be based on reasons which already independently
apply to the subjects of the directives and are relevant to their action in the cir-
cumstances covered by the directive’.29 This thesis is concomitant with Raz’s
instrumental view of authority as legitimate where it fulfils the service of social
coordination; that its role and primary normal function in a political context is to
serve the governed by helping them act on reasons that would apply to them
independently of the authoritative directives that it issues.30 An example is tax-
ation. The subjects of a state have good reasons to follow laws of taxation set up by
political authorities if such laws lead to a just distribution of wealth. An authority
is legitimate if it effectively implements laws of taxation that enable subjects to act
better on the reasons that apply to them when they follow the commands that
apply to them.31 As Raz notes, it is no longer fashionable in political contexts to
claim that the propositions of authorities are entitled to be believed; our tendency is
rather to speak of expert research informing the public policy debate. Raz none-
theless supports his dependence thesis by noting the close analogy between theor-
etical and practical authority.32 Experts of all varieties should give advice based on
‘the very same reasons which should sway ordinary people who wish to form their
own minds independently’, but the ‘expert’s advantage is in his easy access to the
evidence and in his ability to better grasp its significance’ and ‘the evidence on
which he should base his advice to me is the same evidence on which it would have
been appropriate for me to form my own judgment’.33 Raz concludes that, while
Duke 33

theoretical and practical exercises of authority provide reasons for different things,
they share the same basic structure. Indeed, he cites the applicability of the depend-
ence thesis in the case of theoretical authorities as evidence of its applicability in the
political sphere.34
The foregoing discussion of Raz’s dependence thesis illustrates why Gadamer’s
account of authority serves as a corrective to attempts to set up an abstract dichot-
omy between reasons for action and reasons for belief. Political authorities in
contemporary liberal democratic regimes face a range of coordination problems
regarding distribution of goods, educational and health outcomes, etc. which
require a level of expertise regarding the facts of the matter and upon which the
claim to legitimacy of those authorities rests. Far from being authoritarian, the
presence of rational justification for practical decisions in political contexts is what
most clearly differentiates just governance from the arbitrary commands of a dic-
tator, because it bases the legitimacy of authority upon recognition by subjects of
truth-claims made by authorities. In the political context such recognition, for
example, could be thought to take the form of a consent which is dependent
upon the claims of those in authority to be able effectively to coordinate the
common good. On this view, consent provides the best safeguard for arbitrary
abuses of power precisely when it is embedded within a normative framework
shared by the members of a political community.35
Gadamer’s account of authority could be taken to suggest that being ‘in author-
ity’ is legitimate only on the assumption that the person wielding power in a pol-
itical context is ‘an authority’ in a suitably attenuated sense. This is a strong claim
even with the qualification, yet Raz’s dependence thesis demonstrates the sense in
which such an understanding of authority is still implicitly embedded in models of
political decision-making extant in contemporary liberal democratic regimes.
Gadamer’s analysis arguably allows one to maintain an account of legitimate
authority which incorporates reference to an attenuated presumption of epistemic
superiority without neglecting the role played by the consent of the governed in the
recognition of authority claims. Such an account of authority is not necessarily
conservative. It does, however, raise questions regarding the intelligibility of a non-
relativized notion of authority which could serve as a ground for the relativized
notions embedded in the legal and institutional frameworks of particular political
traditions. It is to these questions that I now turn.

3. Moral autonomy and tradition

Gadamer’s account, I have argued, allows us to grasp that legitimate authority
should be understood in terms of a right to rule in the interests of all, based on
genuine knowledge and insight in relation to the concrete and inherently practical
normative frameworks handed down by tradition. The full extent of the political
implications of Gadamer’s notion of authority cannot be adequately explored
within the scope of this article, but some lines of development can be traced by
examining debates on the conflict between political authority and moral autonomy.
34 European Journal of Political Theory 13(1)

Contemporary political philosophy generally considers authority as a normative

rather than a descriptive notion, distinguishing it from the de facto maintenance of
public order and, more generally, from power, understood as the ability to compel
compliance. The notion of authority suggests a right to command and be obeyed.
As we saw in the previous section, someone being ‘in authority’ in the modern sense
thus suggests less an interpretation of some authoritative experience than an
authoritative content-independent command. The problem of political authority,
when framed in terms of legitimacy, thus immediately suggests a tension between
authority, understood as the right to issue commands that subjects have a duty to
obey independently of the specific content of those commands, and moral auton-
omy. The tension falls out of the assumption that a political authority has a right to
issue content-independent reasons, namely reasons ‘where there is no direct con-
nection between the reason and the action for which it is a reason’, insofar as ‘the
reason is in the apparently ‘‘extraneous’’ fact that someone in authority has said
so’.36 If authority is regarded as emanating from the source issuing a command
rather than from the specific content of that command, however, then the reasons
for following or not following the command are seemingly divorced from questions
of justification and based upon obedience. This could in turn be taken to suggest
that political authority is illegitimate under all conditions because the obedience
associated with such authority is inconsistent with the moral autonomy of the
subject. Wolff’s In Defense of Anarchism (1970) is the locus classicus for this line
of argument.37 The fundamental assumption of moral philosophy for Wolff, fol-
lowing Kant, is that men are solely responsible for their own actions. While de facto
there is a tendency for the citizens of a state to follow the commands of authorities
without further questioning, from the standpoint of rational justification such citi-
zens have a universal moral obligation to take responsibility for their own actions.
Wolff thus claims that the conditions under which one person has claims to author-
ity over another must be established by an a priori argument according to which
some men have a moral right to rule.38 But such an argument cannot be established
a priori, suggesting that philosophical anarchism is the correct response to the
conflict between political authority and moral autonomy.
The initial plausibility of Wolff’s argument rests on its tendency to conflate
legitimate authority in the Gadamerian sense and the arbitrary commands of a
putative authority. Wolff’s focus upon supreme authority indeed suggests a close
connection between political authority and modern sovereignty on the Hobbesian
model, with the result that he tends to think of political authority in decisionistic
terms – in terms of the arbitrary content-independent demands of an absolute ruler
– thus divorcing the notion from questions of knowledge and truth. Whilst Wolff
concedes that we do well to submit to the superior knowledge of the medical expert,
he argues that for the autonomous person in more practical contexts there is no
such thing as a command:

If I am on a sinking ship and the captain is giving orders for manning the lifeboats,
and if everyone else is obeying the captain because he is the captain, I may decide
under the circumstances I better do what he says, since the confusion caused by
Duke 35

disobeying him would be generally harmful. But insofar as I make a decision, I am not
obeying his command; that is, I am not acknowledging him as having authority over
me. I would make the same decision, for exactly the same reasons, if one of the
passengers had started to issue ‘orders’ and had, in the confusion, come to be
obeyed.39

Wolff’s example abstracts from the fact that the captain is in a position to issue
commands precisely because of his superior knowledge of ships, emergency naut-
ical situations, etc. To say that one would make the same decisions and for the
same reasons if a random passenger was to issue orders simply overlooks the role
that positions of authority have in establishing rational and coordinated responses
to concrete situations. The right way to think about this example – consistent with
Gadamer’s analysis of the normativity of authority relations – is that the com-
mands of a ship captain are generally taken as authoritative because of his putative
expertise and this is why he is the captain. Of course, there is always the possibility
that someone who has been ascribed the role of captain may lack the relevant
expertise, but this is just to say that the legitimacy of the authority issuing com-
mands is dubious in this case.
The core of Wolff’s position is its rejection of the idea that a command can ever
be legitimate for a morally autonomous agent. This rejection falls out of an
association of authority with commands that impose an obligation to perform
content-independent duties. Authority and moral autonomy are thus said to be
incompatible insofar as the former is understood in terms of commands that are
authoritative merely because they have been made by the relevant authority. This
way of framing the issue, as I have suggested, misses the crucial difference between
legitimate and illegitimate authority. It is of course true that, if one distinguishes
between descriptive and normative conceptions of political authority, then the
legitimacy of a particular authority can never be grounded simply upon the fact
that a certain command has been issued by the relevant authority. Undoubtedly
there are genuine problems concerning not only the fallibility of political autho-
rities, but also the difficulty of judging the conditions under which political author-
ity is genuinely morally legitimate from the perspective of those subject to its
demands. Yet these are problems that should be understood in terms of the dis-
tinction between legitimate and illegitimate authority, not as conclusions that
follow simply from a simplistic identification of political authority with arbitrary
political decision.
Gadamer’s response to one of Habermas’s criticisms is instructive. In his critique
of Gadamer, Habermas suggests that dogmatic acknowledgement of tradition can
only be equated with knowledge insofar as the tradition in question guarantees
freedom from constraint (force) in relation to agreement about the validity of
tradition.40 Acknowledging Habermas’s claim that authority exercises force,
Gadamer insists that the narrow antithesis of authority and reason, whereby the
former is associated with simple obedience, can never explain why authority is
associated with ordered structures (Ordnungen) rather than the disorder which
generally accompanies the exercise of force alone.41 It is acknowledgement, for
36 European Journal of Political Theory 13(1)

Gadamer, which constitutes the determining factor in true authority relationships

and in order to see that this is so it is sufficient to point to instances of the loss or
decline of authority. Embedded within Gadamer’s defence of authority is an affirm-
ation of the capacity of institutions to serve as ordered structures for the historical
preservation and transmission of the truth-claims of a concrete form of tradition.
Again, the notion of authority is related to the capacity of institutional orders to
transmit and protect the customs and laws recognized as valid by a particular
political community. Political leaders exercise legitimate authority, such a view
suggests, to the extent that they successfully interpret and apply the rational prin-
ciples embodied in traditional institutions and laws.
As Warnke has suggested, Walzer’s distinction between minimal or thin and
maximal or thick moralities is applicable here.42 Walzer argues persuasively that,
in his terms, morality is in the first instance maximal insofar as more universal ideas
of justice are based upon an abstraction from concrete forms of ethical life. He points
out, moreover, that Habermas’s ideal discursive situation instantiates ‘an entirely
decent liberal or social democratic thickness’43 and ideas of freedom and equality as
ultimate goods. From a Gadamerian perspective, Wolff’s demand for an a priori
deduction of the state44 similarly overlooks the extent to which the very possibility of
moral autonomy presupposes the normative framework of concrete political trad-
itions and practices.45 One way to think of this is in terms of the claim that the state
does not so much promote justice in the political sense as that it establishes justice.
The claim here is not that a state constitutes justice in the sense of bringing it into
being, but rather that a state determines the rules that serve as a normative frame-
work for subsequent decisions as to whether actions are just or unjust. Wolff’s ana-
lysis goes wrong from the start because it places absolute value upon a notion of
moral autonomy which presupposes the normative force of a tradition, as embodied
in ‘thick’ ethical practices, customs, institutions and laws, to get off the ground. In
assuming that the moral autonomy of each individual has priority over collective
ethical and political demands, Wolff thus underestimates the difficulty of upholding
the moral autonomy of an individual outside of an associative political framework
that allows for social stability and freedom from constraint.
Gadamer and Habermas differ less in their appeal to rational and open discus-
sion than in their appraisal of the possibility of stepping outside the traditional
normative framework embodied in concrete institutions and laws. The primary
implication of Gadamer’s account is that open discussion should be guided by
the concrete facts of the matter as mediated through normative traditions rather
than arbitrary opinion.46 For Gadamer, the Socratic dialogue is paradigmatic of a
form of communication in which participants engage in a form of questioning
openness that is guided by reality – die Sache – rather than by selfish or vested
individual interests. On such a model it is orientation by the things themselves that
provides a necessary condition of rational political debate and the recognition of
competing perspectives, insofar as it provides a standard against which diverging
truth-claims can be rationally assessed as legitimate or arbitrary.47
Gadamer’s account does render problematic attempts to base specific claims to
political authority on a prior non-relativized notion. Despite his defence of the
Duke 37

dependence thesis, Raz is one prominent theorist who attempts to ‘explain the
notion of legitimate authority through what one might call an ideal exercise of
authority’.48 In attempting to attain a view of authority sub specie aeternitatis,
Raz’s theory, from a Gadamerian perspective, makes a futile attempt to assume
a perspective outside the normative framework of a concrete form of tradition. Raz
himself acknowledges that his argument is ‘inescapably a normative argument’ and
‘part of an attempt to make explicit elements of our common traditions’; even that
his account is a partisan one ‘furthering the cause of certain strands in the common
tradition by developing new or newly recast arguments in their favour’.49 Such
concessions demonstrate the plausibility of Gadamer’s situating of the normative
grounds of authority in the claims to truth of a concrete tradition.

Notes
1. For Habermas’s original critique and the subsequent exchange with Gadamer see Karl-
Otto Apel, Rüdiger Bubner and Claus von Bormann (1973) Hermeneutik und
Ideologiekritik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. See also Karl-Otto Apel
(1973)Transformation der Philosophie, pp. 9–76. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag. Albrecht Wellmer (1971) A Critical Theory of Society, tr. J. Cumming. New
York: Herder & Herder.
2. Hans-Georg Gadamer (2004) Truth and Method, tr. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G.
Marshall, p. 281. New York and London: Continuum. German quotations are from
Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960/1990) Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philoso-
phischen Hermeneutik. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr.
3. Gadamer (2004, in n. 2), p. 279.
4. Ibid. p. 280.
5. Ibid.
6. For a clear critical overview see Jack Mendelson (1979) ‘The Habermas–Gadamer
Debate’, New German Critique 18: 44–73.
7. Gadamer (n. 2), p. 278.
8. Ibid. p. 281.
9. According to the influential terminology introduced by H. L. A. Hart, a reason is
content-independent if it is intended to function ‘as a reason independently of the
nature or character of the actions to be done’. H. L. A. Hart (1982) Essays on
Bentham, p. 101. Oxford: Oxford University Press. A command is peremptory if it is
‘intended to preclude or cut off any independent deliberation by the hearer pro and con
of the merits of doing the act’. Ibid. p. 100.
10. Gadamer (2004, in n. 2), p. 281.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. I am thinking in particular of the decisionism of the early Carl Schmitt. Gadamer’s
suggestion that the infamous sentence Die Partei (oder der Führer) hat immer recht is
false not because it appeals to the authority of the leader, but rather because it serves to
buttress that leadership against any legitimate criticism through the arbitrary force of
the leader’s decision, is instructive in this context. Ibid. p. 374.
16. Ibid. p. 296.
38 European Journal of Political Theory 13(1)

17. Ibid. pp. 350–1.

18. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for emphasizing the importance of this point.
19. Ibid. pp. 17–27. For an excellent discussion of this theme see John D. Schaeffer (1990)
Sensus communis: Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism. Durham, NC, and
London: Duke University Press.
20. Ibid. p. 19.
21. Ibid.
22. Hannah Arendt (1958/2006) ‘What is Authority?’ in Between Past and Future, p. 119.
New York: Penguin.
23. R. B. Friedman (1973) ‘On the Concept of Authority in Political Philosophy’, in Joseph
Raz (ed.) (1990) Authority, p. 57. New York: New York University Press.
24. Ibid.
25. As Friedman suggests, being ‘an authority’ generally rests on inequality in the sense of
entailing an epistemic assumption of superior insight and knowledge about a particular
state of affairs. A person being ‘in authority’, by contrast, does not presuppose an
inequality antecedent to the authority relation itself; indeed it seems to presuppose a
certain level of formal equality (ibid. p. 82). If no subject can persuade the others that
her judgement is superior, then there is an increased need, from the point of view of
stability and security, for someone to be ‘in authority’. In this sense, someone being ‘in
authority’ is suggestive of dissociation from a normative background of shared beliefs or
at the very least a desire to overcome the violence and disorder caused by competing
belief systems. The contractarian theory of sovereignty articulated by Hobbes is exem-
plary for this modern tendency, but its continued relevance explains, rather than contra-
dicts, the tendency of modern parliamentary democracies to present themselves as based
on positive laws rather than commands imposed by the arbitrary will of a ruler.
26. Ibid.
27. The distinction between TA and PA could be taken to hinge on the more fundamental
‘is–ought’ distinction. Reasons for belief presumably reflect facts of the matter amenable
to description, whereas reasons for action are normative in that they provide reasons
why one should perform some act.
28. See e.g. Leslie Green (1988) The Authority of the State, pp. 36–51. Oxford: Clarendon
Press. Joseph Raz (1986) The Morality of Freedom, pp. 23–69. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. Scott Shapiro (2002) ‘Authority’ in The Oxford Handbook of
Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law, pp. 382–439. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
29. Raz (n. 28), p. 47.
30. Raz’s Normal Justification Thesis (NJT) asserts that ‘the normal way to establish that a
person has authority over another person involves showing that the alleged subject is
better likely to comply with reasons that apply to him (other than the alleged authori-
tative directives) if he accepts the directives of the alleged authority as authoritatively
binding and tries to follow them, rather than by trying to follow the reasons that apply
to him directly’ (Ibid. p. 53). To simplify Raz’s formulation, the claim made here is that
the legitimacy of political authority falls out of the conformity between the authoritative
commands and independent reasons that subjects have for following the content of
those demands. The explanatory power of the NJT is thus evident in situations when
subjects comply better with their duties overall by submission to authority than they
would based on independent assessment of the rights and wrongs of a particular case.
31. Authoritative reasons are pre-emptive insofar as ‘the fact that an authority requires
performance of an action is a reason for its performance which is not to be added to
all other relevant reasons when asserting what to do, but should exclude and take the
Duke 39

place of some of them’ (ibid. p.46). The notion of a pre-emptive reason is thus closely
related to that of a peremptory reason discussed in the previous section.
32. Ibid. p. 53.
33. Ibid. pp. 52–3.
34. Ibid. p. 53.
35. Cf. Green (n. 28), pp. 158–84.
36. Raz (n. 28), p. 35.
37. According to Wolff, ‘if all men have a continuing obligation to achieve the highest
degree of autonomy possible, then there would be no state whose subjects have a
moral obligation to obey its commands’ (ibid. p. 30). For a more recent defence of
the philosophical anarchist position see A. J. Simmons (2001) Justification and
Legitimacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
38. R. P. Wolff (1970) In Defence of Anarchism, p. 23. New York: Harper & Row.
39. Ibid. p. 28.
40. Jürgen Habermas (1973) ‘Die Universalitätsanspruch der Hermeneutik’ in Apel et al.
(n. 1), p. 156.
41. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1973) ‘Rhetorik, Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik:
Metakritische Erörterungen zu ‘‘Wahrheit und Methode’’’, in Apel et al. (n. 1), p. 73.
42. Michael Walzer (1994) Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad. Notre
Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press. For Walzer, minimal moralities are concerned with
abstract universal principles of justice and truth; maximal moralities are concerned
with concrete practices and institutions established within the traditions of a specific
community. For a more detailed account of the relevance of Walzer’s moral theory to
the Gadamer–Habermas debate see Georgia Warnke (2002) ‘Hermeneutics, Ethics, and
Politics’, in Robert Dostal (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, pp. 79–101.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
43. Walzer (n. 42), p. 12.
44. Wolff (n. 38), p. 23.
45. Gadamer commends Aristotelian ethics in particular for its recognition of the indispens-
ability of tradition and for its grounding in the politics of correct law-giving. The moral
philosophy of modernity, by contrast, with its emphasis upon the free rational auton-
omy of the individual, is abstract and revolutionary (Gadamer (2004, in n. 2) p. 282).
Something of what is at stake here is captured in Gadamer’s seemingly incidental note
that Descartes did not completely place in question the moral assumptions of his time in
his attempted reconstruction of the whole of scientific knowledge (Ibid. p. 280). This
suggests that the attempt to completely step outside of one’s tradition and horizons is
misguided. Gadamer’s claim is thus that the reality of morals (Sitten) is determined by
tradition and not the product of the free insight of each individual.
46. This model of communicative rationality advocated by Gadamer was first outlined in
his early work Plato’s Dialectical Ethics (1931). The primary way ethical traditions
undergo change in history for Gadamer is through dialogue, a mode of inherently eth-
ical communication in which I engage with the viewpoint of another from my own
viewpoint. Engagement with the views of an interlocutor with a different viewpoint is
analogous to engagement with the past, whereby the condition of successful communi-
cation is openness to the other which is nonetheless always a situated openness from
within a particular horizon. A fusion of horizons in which two interlocutors from dif-
ferent traditions engage with each other in an effort of mutual understanding is the
model here, rather than an ideal speech situation free from restraints. See Gadamer
(2004 in n. 2), pp. 362–82. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1986) The Idea of the Good in
40 European Journal of Political Theory 13(1)

Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, tr. P. Christopher Smith. New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1991) Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, tr. R.
Wallace. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
47. This is consistent with Gadamer’s own remarks on his political allegiances. See
Hans-Georg Gadamer (2001) Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary,
pp. 78–85. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. There are perhaps affinities between
Gadamer’s emphasis upon the normative force of concrete historical and political trad-
itions and a moderate conservatism of the kind expressed by Burke. Burke’s claim in his
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) that the state is less a contract between
isolated individuals than a product of tradition, custom and historical development is
certainly resonant of Gadamer’s rejection of the Enlightenment’s abstract revolutionary
principles of reason. One question this raises is the role played by what Habermas refers
to as a specific collectivity in relation to the legitimation of the authority of tradition.
Lafont suggests in this context that for Gadamer tradition contains a claim to validity
and truth that goes beyond knowledge and reasoning; that it is a source of solidarity and
identity for a collectivity that recognizes itself in that tradition. See Christina Lafont
(1999) The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy, tr. José Medina, p. 115.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lafont’s allusion to the concept of a homogeneous polit-
ical community in this passage is troublingly suggestive of the exclusion of the interests
of marginalized groups who do not fully participate in the normative framework of a
specific tradition. Yet this is arguably a distorted interpretation of Gadamer’s argument.
Gadamer certainly places in question Habermas’s model of universal and dominance-
free agreement, insofar as the participants in the conversation can at no point comple-
tely suspend the normative authority of their own tradition but rather only participate
on the basis of the perspective it enables, yet as we have seen, its guiding principles are
inclusion and openness, not exclusion and resistance to change.
48. Raz (n. 28), p. 27.
49. Ibid.