Auctoritas is the latin word for authority. According to Benveniste, it comes from the verb augeo ("to augment"): the auctor is is qui auget, the one who augments the act – or the juridical situation – of another. The English word "Author" also derives from auctoritas and augeo.

Auctoritas is used in Roman law to design the Senate's authority, as opposed to potestas ("power") or imperium, which is detained by the magistrates or the people. In the private domain, auctoritas is the auctor's characteristic: the pater familias "authorizes", that is validates and legitimates, his son's wedding in prostate. Auctoritas is a juridical power to validate, legitimate another act: in itself, it has no sense, as it has to be related to this other act. In other words, law (more generally, right) doubles and recovers life in a dialectic relationship.

Philosopher Giorgio Agamben has demonstrated the relationship between the Roman auctoritas, Max Weber's "charismatic power" and Carl Schmitt's tentative to produce groundwork for the national-socialist Führertum doctrine. Sovereignty was first defined by the pseudo-Archytas, he shows, as "living law" (nomos empsuchon), which direct equivalent in the 20th century is doubtlessly the Führerprinzip: the Führer is "living law", according to this theory of sovereignty – which may explain – Agamben doesn't directly refers to that, but it can be deduced from his work – why no written order of the "Final Solution" have been found, apart from the 1942 Wannsee Conference. As "living law", the Führer is distinguished from gramma, or written law, as auctoritas differs from the magistrates' observance of written law. The Führer has no use whatsoever of "written law", as he is – in Nazi theory – himself the incarnation of law.

Giorgio Agamben's explanation of Auctoritas

According to Giorgio Agamben , "Auctoritas and potestas are clearly distinct - although they form together a binary system" . Agamben quotes Mommsen, who explains that auctoritas is "less than an order and more than an advice" .

Auctoritas, "charism" and Führertum doctrine

While potestas derives from the social function, auctoritas "immediately derives from the patres personal condition". As such, it is akin to Max Weber's concept of charism. According to Agamben, this is why, when the king died, the tradition demanded to create a wax-double of the sovereign in the funus imaginarium, as did Ernst Kantorowicz demonstrate in The King's Two Bodies (1957): in the person detaining auctoritas – the sovereign – public life and private life have become inseparable. Augustus, the first Roman emperor who claimed auctoritas as the basis of princeps status in a famous passage of Res Gestae, had opened up his house to public eyes. It is thus necessary to distinguish two bodies of the sovereign in order to assure dignitas (term used by Kantorowicz, here a synonym of auctoritas) continuity.

The concept of auctoritas played a key-role in fascism and nazism, in particular concerning Carl Schmitt's theories, argues Agamben:

"To understand modern phenomenons such as the fascist Duce or the nazi Führer, it is important not to forget their continuity with the principe of auctoritas principis {Agamben refers here to Augustus's Res Gestae}. {…} Neither does the Duce nor the Führer represent constitutionnally defined public charges – even though Mussolini and Hitler endorsed respectively the charge of head of government and Reich's chancellor, just as Augustus endorsed the imperium consulare or the potestas tribunicia. The Duce 's or the Führer's qualities are immediately related to the physical person and belong to the biopolitical tradition of auctoritas and not to the juridical tradition of potestas"

Thus, Agamben opposes Foucault's concept of "biopolitics" to right (law), as he defines the state of exception, in Homo sacer, as the inclusion of life by right under the figure of exception, which is simultaneously inclusion and exclusion. Following Walter Benjamin's lead, he explains that our task would be to radically differentiate "pure violence" from right, instead of tying them together, as did Carl Schmitt.

Agamben concludes his chapter on "Auctoritas and potestas''" writing:

"It is significative that modern specialists were so enclined to admit that auctoritas was inherent to the living person of the pater or the princeps. What was evidently an ideology or a fictio aiming to be the groundwork of auctoritas' preeminence or, at least, specific rank compared to potestas thus became a figure of right's {law – "droit"} immanence to life. (...) Although it is evident that there can't be an eternal human type that would incarnate each time in Augustus, Napoleon, Hitler, but only more or less comparable ("semblables") mechanisms {"dispositif", a term often used by Foucault} – the state of exception, the justitium, the auctoritas principis, the Führertum –, put in use in more or less differents circumstances, in the 1930s – overall, but not only – in Germany, the power that Weber had defined as "charismatic" is related to the concept of auctoritas and elaborated in a Führertum doctrine as the original and personal power of a leader. In 1933, in a short article intending to define the fundamental concepts of national-socialism, Schmitt defines the Führung principe by the "root identity between the leader and his entourage" {"identité de souche entre le chef et son entourage"} (we shall note the use of weberian concepts)."

Interregnum, justitium and nomos empsuchos (the sovereign as "living law")

In the chapter preceding Auctoritas and potestas, Agamben advances an explanation of the transformation of justitium, a technical term referring to the state of exception, declared to cope with tumultus state (rebellion, uprising, riots…), at the end of the Roman Republic, into a term simply referring to the mourning of the sovereign's death during interregnum periods:

"The correspondence between justitutium and mourning here shows its true signification. If the sovereign is a living nomos, if then anomie and nomos coïncide in his person without any left-over, then anarchy (which, at his death, when the link attaching him to law his broken, threatens to unleash itself in the city) must be ritualized and controlled, by the transformation of state of exception in public mourning and of mourning in justitium (…) Before acquiring the modern form of a decision on emergency {Schmitt's definition}, relationship between sovereignty and state of exception present itself under the form of an identity between the sovereign and anomie. As living law, the sovereign is deeply anomos. Here also the state of exception is the life – more secret and true – of law."

The first formulation of the thesis according to which "the sovereign is a living law" found its first formulation on the treaty "On law and justice" by pseudo-Archytas, conserved by Stobée with Diotogène's treaty on sovereignty. It is the first attempt to conceive a form of sovereignty completely enfranchised from laws, being itself the source of legitimacy. This theory must be radically distinguished from natural rights theory or Antigone's appeal to the "eternal and unwritten laws" to which even monarchs must abide, as it is a theory of sovereignty (in fact, it is quite the reverse of Antigone's rebellion).

Pseudo-Archytas distinguished the sovereign (basileus), who is the law, from the magistrate (archōn), who limits himself to observing the law. "Identification between law and sovereign has as consequence, writes Agamben, the scission of law into a "living" law (nomos empsuchos), hierarchically superior, and a written law (gramma), which is subordinate to the first one". He then quotes A. Delatte's Essais sur la politique pythagoricienne (Paris, 1922), himself quoting the pseudo-Archytas:

"I say that all communities are composed of an archōn (the magistrate who commands), a commanded one, and, as tierce party, laws. Among those ones, the living one is the sovereign (ho men empsuchos ho basileus), and the inanimate one is the letter (gramma). Law is the first element, the king is legal, the magistrate accorded to law, the commanded free and all of the city happy; but, in case of corruption ("dévoiement"), the sovereign is a tyrant, the magistrate is not accorded to law and the community is unhappy."

See also

• Authoritarianism
• Führerprinzip
• Roman law
• Giorgio Agamben
• Dignitas

Endnotes

• Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (2005)
• Theodor Mommsen, Römisches Staatsrecht ("Roman Constitutional Law", volume III) (Graz, 1969)
• Agamben, State of Exception (ibid.), chapter 6 "Auctoritas and potestas", § 7.
• Agamben, ibid., chapter 6, § 8.
• Agamben, ibid., chapter 5, § 3.

References

• Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (2005) and Homo sacer
• Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York, Viking, 1961) "The Concept of Authority"

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