On Authority’s Primacy over Power:
Putting Authority into Perspective
Jean-Pierre Cléro
Université de Rouen
Nomography as the science of authority
Foucault was often praised because he understood that the exercise of power was not only vertical, as in the case of political sovereignty but also horizontal and that it permeated all spheres of civil society. Supposing this was a discovery he made about power, the same remark could not be applied to authority, for the issue of authority was quite early torn apart between very diverse registers, even when it was studied from the point of view of political philosophy. Thus, when Hobbes explained the political contract as being the transmission of a right to a sovereign in Book I, Chapter XVI of Leviathan, he analysed authority in terms that largely extended beyond the political sphere: “Of persons artificial, some have their words and actions owned by those whom they represent. And then the person is the actor; and he that owneth his words and actions, is the author: in which case the actor acteth by authority.” Authority is not a quality but the designation of a being, which does not necessarily have any empirical existence, but which is supposed to have done or said something that binds all those it represents. It is easy to conceive the legal and political interest of such a notion that makes it possible to act in the name of others, but it is clear as well that that notion extends far beyond the legal and political spheres. The fact that authority is collected in one subject, or even a subject of subjects, that is a community, is not its only basis. As Hobbes said, “There are few things, that are incapable of being represented by fiction. Inanimate things, as a church, an hospital, a bridge, may be personated by a rector, master, or overseer”. He at once added that “things inanimate, cannot be authors … such things cannot be personated, before there be some state of civil government”. Very soon, though, philosophers who had read Hobbes - British ones in particular - strove to show that he was wrong and used the term “authority” about texts in an extra political sense and not only because they were sacred, as well as about images, paintings, sometimes about objects that were quite trivial, about ideas, representations, sentiments, and even animals. Hasn’t such an incredible generalisation of authority relegated the concept to the rank of a simple metaphor? Or has such an extension, on the contrary, allowed the legal and political use of the concept to be specified to the point that, as Foucault’s analysis of micro-powers forcefully shows, the Moderns were sometimes able to open it onto the classical problem of its opposition to freedom?