One hesitates to write about “authority” because in today’s culture the concept carries such a stigma that the danger of being misunderstood and getting mired down in ideological diatribes is very high. Yet, the very fact that it is hard to talk about authority confirms that this is the punctum dolens of modern Western culture. This was also the opinion of Augusto Del Noce (1910–1989) who in 1975 dedicated to the theme of authority a long essay of the same title,[1]
in which he argues that “the eclipse of the idea of authority is one of the essential characteristics of today’s world; in fact, it is the most immediately observable characteristic.”[2] He goes on to observe that this crisis manifests itself across so many different domains (the family, education, the church) that it cannot be studied in merely sociological terms. It is a philosophical crisis, which reflects a deeper crisis in our collective understanding of the human condition.
1. The Concept of Authority
To support his claim Del Noce points out that over the last few centuries the common perception of the meaning of the word authority has undergone a reversal. Etymologically, authority shares the same root as “author” and implies the idea of being “authored” or “augmented” (the Latin verb augere means “to make grow”). Authority means the power to generate and increase life, as parents do. Accordingly, the paradigm of authority is the figure of the father, which however in modernity has generally taken a negative, oppressive connotation. A common cliché in popular culture is that we do not grow by following a father-figure or a teacher, but rather by freeing ourselves from external influences, and by unleashing our potential as autonomous individuals who contain in ourselves all necessary resources for our self-realization. As Del Noce says
the etymology of authority includes the idea that humanitas is fulfilled in man when a principle of non-empirical nature frees him from a state of subjection and leads him to his proper end, as a rational and moral being. Man’s freedom, as power of attention and not of creation, consists in his capacity to subordinate himself to this higher principle of liberation and be freed from the pressures from below. Conversely, today the common mentality by and large associates the idea of authority with that of “repression,” and identifies it with what stops “growth,” what opposes it, reversing what the etymology implies.[3]
It must be noted that the “growth” mentioned by Del Noce in this passage cannot be merely biological, or more generally “mechanical,” since in that case no external support would be necessary after childhood. What is at stake is growth in humanity, as rational and moral beings. Thus, the idea of authority is inextricably tied to the notion that human life is different from purely animal life, because it involves questions of “meaning,” moral and religious questions. Consequently, the need for authority is tied to the religious dimension and to the idea of “tradition,” since tradition means precisely the “handing down” of insights about humanity, about the good and the just and the beautiful. In this sense, “the question of authority is, in fact, the relationship between man and the invisible, the primacy of the invisible.”[4]
"Affirming authority is the same as affirming the primacy of the invisible"
—Augusto Del Noce
Furthermore, the concept of authority is linked with a specific concept of freedom as the capacity to precisely embrace those higher goods, and to pursue specifically human ends which transcend mere animal nature. Conversely, the modern rejection of authority is tied to what Del Noce calls an “instinctual” concept of freedom, whereby people cannot discriminate between different ends, but can only be “free” (or not) to pursue the dictates of their instincts. This is the “libertarian” and “permissive” idea of freedom: “today’s permissivism replaces ‘freedom to’ with ‘freedom from.’ It is a form of liberation in which every ascetic element, even in the most secular sense, is abolished. It is ‘libertarianism’ replacing the liberal spirit … Liberation coincides with the affirmation of instinctual freedom.”[5]
Under such libertarian-permissive regimes no rational discussion about values is possible, and thus authority can only be “repressive.”
2. Authority vs. Power
This brings us to what Del Noce regards as the ultimate manifestation of the eclipse of the idea authority: the impossibility to distinguish “authority” from “power.” Indeed, without a genuine experience of authority, what is left is either self-determination or coercion. As a result, people will tend to “unmask” all forms authority as concealed exercises of power which use ideological deception, propaganda or psychological manipulation rather than brute physical force.
The philosophical consequences of the confusion between authority and power are immense. Indeed, only from the standpoint of their radical distinction can we speak of metaphysics as distinct from ideology. Conversely, if the idea of authority is absorbed into the one of power, it follows that general conceptions of reality are absorbed into ideology, understood as a practical act designed to legitimate, from the standpoint of being, some specific form of power … Accordingly, criticism takes the form of explaining religions and metaphysics (necessarily understood in the plural) in terms of historical factors. Therefore, the belief that the concept of authority is reducible to the concept of power coincides with the “Marxian option,” which is openly or silently accepted by a large part of contemporary culture.[6]
For Del Noce establishing the distinction (and, in fact, the opposition) between authority and power is, in a sense, the key philosophical question of our time, because the denial of this distinction stems from certain crucial metaphysical assumptions that need to be reversed. In order to highlight the fundamental experience that underpins the concept of authority and makes it entirely different from that of power, he refers to Hannah Arendt:
According to Arendt, the obedience and the dependence (or even the discipline) required by authority are qualitatively different both from the idea of “persuasion” and from the idea of “forced coercion.” Persuasion is subjective, egalitarian, and reached through a process of argumentation (what nowadays is called “dialogue”). But after we have distinguished the concept of [authority from that of] persuasion, we must trace it back to the concept of evidence, recognizing that this concept is the great discovery of Greek metaphysics. The submission of the mind to evidence is more radical than submission obtained through force or persuasion; but at the same time it has a liberating nature (from the pressure of lower or exterior forces).[7]
Thus, for Arendt (and Del Noce) authority is first of all an attribute of truth. Truth has the ability to impose itself on the intellect as “liberating evidence.” It demands a submission, but this submission fulfills intelligence instead of alienating it. A visual metaphor is apt: truth is like light which “imposes” itself on the open eye and affords it the vision it seeks according to its very nature. Then, this authority of truth transfers, so to speak, to those who communicate (truthfully) their experience of evidence to others. This communication, too, is liberating because the intelligence of the receiver is illuminated by the truth and can verify its evidence for itself. While power acts on the exterior, the action of authority is interior, and “sharing the same values prevents the hierarchical relationship that characterizes authority from being identified with the one between master and slave.” Thus, “the hierarchy inevitably associated with authority has an intrinsically interior character (because man discovers the order of being in the order of conscience): the freedom of what is specifically human, the rational component, requires the subordination of instinctual freedom.”
3. The Metaphysical Significance of the Idea of Authority
We should observe that the analysis of the link between authority and evidence relies on certain metaphysical “discoveries” which Del Noce, following his teacher Carlo Mazzantini, attributes to classical Greek philosophy, and in particular to Plato. The fundamental assumptions are that there is truth, that it illuminates the intelligence without doing it violence, that it can be received freely, that it is the same for different people and so can be communicated and held in common. Therefore, the concept of authority depends on another fundamental concept that Del Noce identifies with the Platonic tradition, that of participation.
People know, and can communicate their knowledge, because they participate in a common universal rationality, the Logos. In turn, participation in the Logos allows the discovery of permanent, non-arbitrary standards of conduct, which are the foundation of the nomos, the law, and which make possible social life.
The modern crisis of authority reflects the crisis of this classical (Platonic) metaphysics, which Del Noce also calls the “philosophy of the primacy of being”: “the idea of authority, together with those of tradition and sacredness, is inseparable from the philosophy of the primacy of being. To summarize in a formula, we could say that in the philosophy of the primacy of being, authority is the foundation of power, whereas in the philosophy of the primacy of becoming power absorbs authority within itself.”[8]
Del Noce adds that modern philosophy “keeps going back and forth” between “theological rationalism and voluntarism and arbitrarism (fideism, religious existentialism, empiricism)” whereas “the idea of authority implies (a) that truth has a super-human character, so that dependence on it coincides with liberation from domination by other men; (b) that man not obey some arbitrary power; (c) on the other hand, that such dependence not be transferred into God Himself; in other words, that his ‘wisdom’ not be understood as a norm to which his will is subordinated.”[9]
4. Authority and Freedom
We are now ready to circle back to the connection between authority and freedom, which for Del Noce is crucial because it illuminates the political consequences of the modern eclipse of the idea of authority.
Having thus recognized that Plato’s nomos,
together with the particular form of obedience that it demands, is the metaphysical foundation of the idea of authority, if we then consider the historical circumstances that led to its affirmation (Socrates being convicted, and the hostility against philosophy on the part of the polis), we can discern from the genesis of its formulation that this idea is inseparable from the idea of freedom. The affirmation of the super-human is what frees man from dependence on other men.[10]
There is a necessary connection between the loss of the idea of authority and the loss of freedom, also at the political level. In particular, Del Noce identifies totalitarianism as the typical political expression of a world view in which the idea of authority has been lost and subsumed into the idea of power. In his view, “totalitarianism means the absolutization of power (i.e. the total absorption of authority within power, leading to that practical disappearance of the idea of authority which is the distinctive characteristic of the present crisis) and the inversion of the process of liberation into the most slavish dependence that history has ever known.”[11]
This “inversion” marks the tragic failure of the whole modern project that started with the European Enlightenment of the 18th century, to the extent that it sought to achieve liberation by denying authority. Still today, it is a commonplace in our culture to think that authority is the enemy of freedom. However,
the progressive-Enlightened mentality faces insurmountable difficulties as soon as it tries to explain the phenomenon of totalitarianism (which has not disappeared at all; it is its nature to take new and previously unpredictable forms), in which the negation of authority and the negation of freedom go hand in hand. These difficulties, I believe, are due to the fact that totalitarianism represents the greatest expansion of power in conjunction with the greatest rejection of authority: we can recognize in it the outcome of the revolution as contradictory to the program of universal liberation. But we have seen that affirming authority is the same as affirming the primacy of the invisible; the negation of the invisible, which characterizes the Enlightened-progressive mindset in its final stage, must erase the distinction between authority and power.[12]
5. Conclusion
Almost half a century later, the process described by Del Noce has essentially run its course. Far from bringing liberation, the Western process of denial of authority has produced the triumph of power, because without authority nothing can “prevent the decline of social relationship into relationships of force.”[13] New strains of totalitarianism are pervasive in our political culture and, surprisingly to some people, what used to be the most “liberal” and anti-authoritarian political forces are now the ones most bent on social control and the least concerned with freedom of speech, association, religion etc. Paradoxical as it may sound, today we face a sort of “anti-authoritarian totalitarianism,” which is keen on using absolute state power in order to stamp out all residual forms of authority (think, for example, of the drive to take away parental rights in the context of “affirmative” gender therapy).
Apart from its predictive power, does Del Noce’s analysis offer any indications for the future? At the very least, it teaches us that there are no “metaphysical shortcuts.” One cannot simply fight power with power, like many people on the “right” side of the political spectrum today still hope to do. By doing that, one merely accelerates the progress of social disintegration associated with the eclipse of authority. Of course, whenever it is possible, we should take appropriate political measures to resist its practical manifestations. But, in the long run, a restoration of freedom and authority (since the two are inseparable) can only be a meta-political process. It will involve a personal and collective return to the common “Platonic” rationality described by Del Noce, which is closely linked with religiosity. It will involve a re-establishment of what Del Noce calls the “primacy of the invisible,” of those realities that are not objects of empirical measurement and yet are more necessary to humans than the air we breathe: truth, justice, beauty. It will involve recognizing again (the Platonic “anamnesis”) certain “evidences” which we all share in common and which we have forgotten. These common evidences, what Luigi Giussani called “elementary experience,”[14] are the only possible foundation not just of human rights and of a democratic political system (in the broad sense of recognizing the equal dignity of each member of society and valuing the contributions of all) but of social life itself. Their rediscovery can only be, strictly speaking, the work of grace but, as Del Noce also says, the action of grace requires “that the hearts of men be attentive.”
[1] Augusto Del Noce, “Autorità” in Rivoluzione Risorgimento Tradizione (Milan: Giuffré, 1993), 513–78. This essay had been originally published (in shorter form) as an entry in Enciclopedia del Novecento (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1975), 1: 416–26, which has recently been reprinted in book form (Rome: Treccani, 2024). A complete English translation titled “Authority vs. Power” is found in Augusto Del Noce, The Crisis of Modernity, trans. C. Lancellotti (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press), 189–246 (TCM from now on). An abridged version appeared in Communio 42 (2015), 265–300.
[2] TCM, 189.
[3] TCM, 189–190.
[4] TCM, 193.
[5] TCM, 205
[6] TCM, 194
[7] TCM, 195. Del Noce is repeating Hannah Arendt’s observations in Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1961) 93, 107–8.
[8] TCM, 197.
[9] TCM, 195. Point c) concerns theological voluntarism, where divine power has become a potentia absoluta.
[10] TCM, 196.
[11] Augusto Del Noce, the Suicide of the Revolution, my translation.
[12] TCM, 205.
[13] Augusto Del Noce, The Problem of Atheism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1921), 428.
[14] Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023), 7ff.
