Let me start off my column this week with a quotation: "Authority is a form of power in which people obey commands not because they have been rationally or emotionally persuaded or because they fear the consequence of disobedience, but simply because they respect the source of the command."
This citation is drawn from an introductory political science textbook. The definitions of the concepts power, legitimacy and authority are the topics of Chapter 2 of the Dickerson, Flanagan and O'Neill work.
I tell you this because these three concepts are at the heart of understanding the nature of politics, government and civil society. When we welcome students into their first political science class we often challenge them by asking, "How is it that we can live together in a country, running our day to day lives, bound by rules that we did not make and never explicitly agreed to follow?"
Truly it is a profound question about the relationship among the state, the society and the individual. What keeps us together?
As I watched the replays of the baseball game between the Baltimore Orioles and the Chicago White Sox at Camden Yards, I was reminded of this important question that we ask about authority and the bonds that keep a civil society from ripping open.
The game was closed to fans. The bats swung and the pitches flew and they even played a song in the 7th inning stretch but the only people there to hear it were the players, the coaches, a grounds crew and a handful of news media.
Outside the gates, the city of Baltimore and some other major cities in America were ringing with the sounds of a breakdown of authority.
Now, as Dickerson and his colleagues point out: "Public authority... is deliberately created by human agreement.... (When) we describe... a police officer, we do not say she is "an authority " by virtue of any personal quality, but rather that she is "in authority" "by virtue of the power entrusted to her by government."
But, of course, it must be more than "the power entrusted to her by government" that makes us obey her authority. And here is where the textbook cuts to the chase: "Power is required to order any society, but it must be more than coercive power if a given society is to be open and free. An advantage of authoritative power over coercive power is that most individuals voluntarily submit to it. But why would people submit to any power that restricts their freedom of action?
"The answer is not easy to find, and political philosophers have grappled with the question for centuries... "
This "tacit" consent that we give to authority has to be built on trust. The state and the civil society and the individual tacitly agree to create a context in which we are more free to live our lives because of the authority we grant to one another and to the state.
The problem is that physical security itself is not enough to ensure that we are safe. Dickerson and his colleagues cite R.M. MacIver who wrote: "(The) authority of government does not create the order over which it presides and does not sustain that order solely by its own fiat or its accredited power. There is authority beyond the authority of government. There is a greater consensus without which the fundamental order of the community would fall apart."
That "consensus" is the basis of civil society.
What we are seeing in the United States right now is not just a breakdown of authority - that is the loss of trust between the state and the people - but a collapse of consensus about how to live together.
There is a broader kind of collapse that is a consequence of poverty and unemployment and illiteracy. It is too easy to characterize this conflict as an explosion of racial tension and to avoid examining the deeper root causes; people rarely erupt into violent action or live violent lives because they want to live that way.
The American consensus was built on the idea of the American dream. But, for so many people, the dream is not ever going to be achieved. Those who feel completely alienated have no reason to tacitly agree to the consensus of civil society.
