In politics, authority generally refers to the ability to make laws, independent of the power to enforce them. People obey authority out of respect, while they obey power out of fear. For example, "the congress has the authority to pass laws" vs "the police have the power to arrest law-breakers".
Questions as to who has what authority often lie at the heart of political debates, and answers normally stem from practical and moral considerations, prior practices and theories of criminal justice or the just war.
In sociology, authority is a particular type of power. The dominant usage comes from functionalism and follows Weber in defining authority as power which is recognised as legitimate and justified by both the powerful and the powerless. Weber further sub-divided authority into three types:
- Traditional authority which simply derives from long-established habits and social structures. The right of hereditary monarchs to rule furnishes an obvious example.
- Charismatic authority. From time to time, people make extraordinary claims of heading a revolution of some kind (which is always against a well-established system of traditional or legal-rational authority). When followers take such claims seriously, this exemplifies charismatic authority: religious or political authority that does not flow from tradition or law, but instead thrives on the short-lived excitement of social change. The careers of Lenin, Martin Luther, Hitler, and Lech Walesa provide examples. Charismatic authority never lasts long (even when successful) and it inevitably gives way to either traditional or to legal-rational authority.
- Legal-rational authority depends for its legitimacy on formal rules, usually written down, and often very complex. Modern societies depend on legal-rational authority.
As an example of the development of legal-rational authority, consider the history of France. In medieval times a king ruled simply because he was the king (i.e., he held traditional authority), but by the 17th century it became necessary to invent a doctrine claiming that Louis XIV ruled by "divine right" - in other words, to justify Louis' authority by a rational claim to his appointment by a legitimate superior (God). This served for another century, but was threatened by the rival claim made to legal-rational authority by the Estates General, and then eclipsed by the charismatic authority held by the leaderss of the French Revolution, which was in turn replaced by the legal-rational authority of the First Republic.
Within conflict theory, "authority" is used both in the same sense as Weber's functionalist definition above, and in a rather different sense which is based on the observation that power is almost never endorsed in a moral sense by those who do not have it, and therefore defines "authority" as power which is so institutionalised that it is largely unquestioned.
Obedience to authority seems thoroughly ingrained in most of the population: the Milgram experiment showed that over 60% of a sample of Americans were willing to torture another person to death when given orders from an appropriate authority figure. This experiment has been replicated in several other cultures with similar results.
- See also: appeal to authority, power, trust, régime, law
Someone who is an authority on a particular subject knows a great deal about it.