Conception Of Political Authority Research Articles

Πολιτικός προσανατολισμός, πολιτική σκέψη και κοινωνικο-ηθική κρίση: Βίοι παράλληλοι;

The article reviews the main research evidence pertaining to the relationship between political ideology and socio-moral reasoning, as it is explicated in L. Kohlberg’s developmental model. A repeated finding of the relevant literature, both previous and more recent, indicates that the qualitative from stage to stage transformations of the sociomoralreasoning structures, constitutes one of the determining factors for the formation of political beliefs or political ideology. As far as the direction of such an impact is concerned, the available evidence shows that conventional sociomoral reasoning tends to be associated with more conservative or right-wing political orientation, whereas postconventional thinking is more often connected to more liberal or left-wing political ideology. The explanation of this association pattern still remains a matter of controversy. The article also reports findings from a study which examined the possible impact of sociomoral reasoning on the developmentally differentiated ways children and adolescents understand a number of key political concepts. The findings of the study indicated points of convergence between the developmental pattern of political thinking and socio-moral reasoning that concerned the conceptualization of government and law in the ages of 12-15 and the concept of political authority in the ages of 15-18 years. The findings did not support any association in primary school students.

Towards a Christian Ontology of Political Authority: The Relationship between Created Order and Providence in Oliver O’Donovan’s Theology of Political Authority

This article argues that the formally similar conceptions of political authority provided in Oliver O’Donovan’s Resurrection and Moral Order and The Desire of the Nations appear to assume different ontologies of political authority. The former account conceives political authority as a special use of natural authorities found in the created order, where ‘authority’ is defined as what it is that evokes free and intelligible human action. The latter account, however, appears to attribute the existence of political authority exclusively to divine providence. I contend that these two accounts of political authority are ostensibly in tension. I also argue that O’Donovan’s subsequent ‘providentialist’ account of political authority is unable to explain how political authority can evoke free and intelligible action in political communities. I maintain that O’Donovan can remove this apparent tension by returning the essence of political authority to creation, as he did in Resurrection and Moral Order, and then regard the Christ-event as redeeming political authority rather than merely restricting its historical function to judgment, as he argues in The Desire of the Nations. The emergence of O’Donovan’s ‘Christian liberalism’ could then be regarded as the ‘work of divine providence in history’ facilitated by the redemption of the natural authorities in the created order.

Suárez on Authority as Coercitive Teacher

Does Suárez's view that political authority rests on consent or agreement make him a herald of modern contractarian theories of the state, as Quentin Skinner has argued? Or does Suárez have a fundamentally different conception of political authority? The paper will argue the latter. Modern theories of coercive authority view it as a product of human artifice, with the functions both of facilitating cooperation through coordination and of threatening sanction to contain ill will. For Suárez, by contrast, coercive authority is divinely instituted, in various ways, and has the further function of enabling the proper human exercise of or response to forms of power that are not ordinary causation. In particular coercive authority acts as a channel and teacher for forms of power that are normative – that constitute various forms of the power of truth or of goodness. Coercive authority exists at the natural level as the authority of the state, channeling the power of natural reason in relation to the good of a community, and at the supernatural level as the authority of the Church channeling the power of grace. Central to the functioning of authority at both the natural and supernatural levels is the coercive direction of belief. This is a conception of authority that is very alien to modern political theory – thanks, in large part, to the influence of Hobbes.

Ought the Mighty To Punish Blasphemers?

In The Mighty and the Almighty: An Essay in Political Theology, Nick Wolterstorff defends the claim that Christian and liberal democratic conceptions of political authority are fundamentally compatible.1 They are fundamentally compatible because both affirm the claim that governmental authority is bound by robust normative constraints. According to liberal democratic conceptions of political authority, government must never violate the natural rights of its citizens, not because so doing would be an abuse of its authority, but because it lacks entirely the authority to do so. “Liberal democracies, as we know them in the West today, have an 'idea' behind them, an implicit commitment to values or principles that make sense of the whole; they are not just fortuitous collocations of disparate elements. I have tacitly been assuming that a central component in the governing idea of those polities is that the natural rights of citizens place normative limits on the authority of government” (153). This generic conception of the 'rights-limited state' comports with a Pauline understanding of political authority and thus an understanding that is normative for Christians: “When we put what Paul says in Romans about the task and authority of the state together with the political implications of the nature and existence of the church, what we get is an argument for a state that is limited in exactly the sort of way that our liberal democracies are limited. . . . That there are normative, rights-based, limits on state authority is implicit in what Paul says God authorizes government to so” (151). At the core of a Christian conception of political authority, says Wolterstorff, is the claim that God authorizes the state to curb wrong-doing and thus that the state lacks the authority to issue directives that wrong citizens (99). In short, in a serendipitous convergence, Christian theology and liberal democracy affirm the legitimacy of a properly limited, morally constrained state. To be sure, this compatibility claim would be rather empty were it not married to the further claim that Christian and liberal democratic conceptions (roughly) agree on the moral limits that define the contours of state authority. Wolterstorff believes that there is substantial agreement and he focuses primarily on the 'first freedom'—the right to religious freedom (152). Both Christian and liberal conceptions of political authority incorporate the claim that each citizen has a right to the 'free exercise' of religion: to speak about God, to gather with others in worship of God, to urge others to join in that worshipping community—all without the

Kant's Transcendental Deduction of Political Authority

The concept of political authority is the guiding problematic of Kant's mature political philosophy. The proper foundation of state authority lies, according to him, in the idea of an “original contract” and it is only in terms of this regulative principle that the sovereign nature of the state can even be conceived. By placing this doctrine at the core of his political thought Kant appears to affirm the fundamental tenet of the contractarian tradition: legitimate political authority arises only from the consent of those under such authority.

Hobbes and the Liberalization of Christianity

AbstractHobbes regarded traditional Christianity as one of the leading threats to the preservation of civil peace. This article argues that he responded to this threat by developing an innovative reinterpretation of Christianity designed to tame it from within. This reinterpretation involved the reshaping of leading Christian doctrines around the same liberal principles that underlie his conception of political authority, the natural law principles of equality of right and inalienable rights. Although this political “liberalization” of Christianity may well have enhanced the prospects of civil peace, it did so by undermining doctrines central to Christianity's biblical roots.