TITLE:
A Survey of the History of Western Political Thought on Political Authority
AUTHORS:
Fu Yu, Pengpeng Deng
KEYWORDS:
Political Authority, Reason, Good, Liberty, Thomas Hobbes, Yves Simon
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Political Science,
Vol.12 No.3,
July
29,
2022
ABSTRACT: In the
non-political field, authority is a social relationship based on personal needs
and a psychological mechanism realized by respect. This determines that
authority is characterized by fragmentation and potential (Chen, 2021).
However, the inherent characteristics of authority are obviously disadvantageous to the rulers who pursue the general
obedience of their subjects. Therefore, in the political field,
authority must be transformed into a universal and unified political authority.
Max Weber believes that authority is the possibility that a group of people will obey certain or all orders (Webber, 1978: p. 212). This also affected the academic
research on political authority after the Second World War, which has
never been divorced from Weber’s empirical research (for instance, Frank
Furedi’s Authority: a Social
Study and Richard Sennett’s Authority). In fact, reviewing
the history of Western political thought, we can find that there are many
political thinkers who try to think about political authority from a normative
point of view, including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and so
on, but their understanding of political authority and the means of legalizing
political authority are different. This paper believes that Hobbes’
understanding of political authority is closer to its essential attribute and
plays an important role in the history of Western political thought, so it is
necessary to focus on it. Of course, due to the limitations of the times,
Hobbes’ view of political authority also has some defects, so it has been questioned by thinkers of different
schools of contemporary thought. By examining Hobbes’ view of political
authority, Yves Simon, the representative of Neo-Thomism, reconstructed the
relationship between authority and liberty, and made a strong positive defense
for political authority. Based on this, this paper has three purposes:
first, by tracing back to the history of Western political thought, make a
normative interpretation of political authority; second, to interpret the core
meaning of Hobbes’ view of political authority; third, survey Yves Simon’s
contemporary exposition of political authority.