Authority By Hannah Arendt: The Concept Of Authority

The concept of authority is tied to an original source or a genesis that stands at the foundation upon which other structures are based on. This idea was offered a further credence by Hannah Arendt and her discussion on authority in the context of Roman experience. In her essay on ‘What is Authority’ Arendt argued that the word autoritas was coined from, a Latin verb augere or augment, and those in authority augment the democratic foundations of a state such as the ancient Roman polis. She argued that those who are in authority obtain their power by descent and by downward transmission from those who founded it. Coining from the political philosophies of Plato, Arendt argued that while the leaders amplified the foundations of authority, they are not the original creators. Rather, authority is based beyond the creation and control of rulers, kings, and philosophers, being analogous to natural laws or God’s commands. The mystical authority made it legit the exercise of power and the enforcement of obedience. Arendt sets an authority against both violence and non-violence by staging an opposition to authority as persuasion as well as coercion. Authority, neither entails the use of external force, so that,

According to her, the authority has vanished from the face of the world. An immediate rejoinder to this eccentric claim could refer to the proliferation of the authoritarian administrations throughout the modern age, ending eventually as it happened in the devastating totalitarianism of the mid to late 20th century. Such a response could then continue to quest whether Arendt is perhaps in bad faith. Is she really making serious claims that authority has been evacuated from the world? In what scenario does she mean by referring to the world. And if the authority vanished from the world, where did it head