Authority

Authority is one of those terms derived from Latin that do not follow the usual rules of such word formation. Composed of "author" plus "-ity", a term based on the Latin "auctōr" with the ending "itās" (see "Origin of authority" in authority). Thus, "-ity" is normally combined with an adjective to form a noun. Dictionary.com gives examples jollity, civility, and Latinity, as derived from "jolly", "civil", and "Latin" (taken as adjectives). "Author", of course, is not an adjective, but a noun or a verb.

As it happens, there is an adjective related to the noun, author, namely "auctorial". This form, chosen in preference to the unused form, "authorial", is more directly derived from the Latin, "auctor". Thus, the normal form to combine with "-ity" would be this adjective, giving an unused form, auctoriality. It would then give a clear, crisp definition of the term:

Auctoriality: the state or condition of being auctorial.

The problem with this definition, of course, is that the term "author" already has a definition as a noun as well as a verb.

We can begin to unravel this issue if we look, again, at the Latin roots. Definition #3 of "author" at Dictionary.com gives,

3. the maker of anything; creator; originator:

All other uses of the term are derived from this. Thus, we can rewrite definition #1 found there as follows:

1. a person who originates a novel, play, poem, essay, law code, computer program, system, transformation, or fundamental change in condition.

There is no need to add what Dictionary.com adds to this, namely, "the composer of a literary work, as distinguished from a compiler, translator, editor, or copyist."

Note the addition of definition #2 becomes "the body of work of an author".

And, of course, definition #4 is subsumed in definition #1. We should add that in each of these cases, language plays a fundamental role, whether natural or artificial. This distinguishes the term "author" from related terms, such as "composer" (of a piece of music) or artist or choreographer, although, technically, definition #3 at Dictionary.com would seem to include composer, artist and choreographer, it would be highly atypical to use the term in any of these three senses.

Interestingly, it could be used in a natural way for a patent application, a contract and a variety of other written forms. One can also acknowledge that music, art and dance can be said to have a kind of "language". Dance, for example, has a graphic notation. See dance notation. Theater and film work with a script, but a play or film always captures creative details, or nuances, that were never covered in the written guide. We may also note, in passing, that Google catalogs several articles containing the expression "painting language" or "language of painting" and the same thing applies to "sculpture".

Very little of this prepares us for the usual definitions of "authority"!

We need to consider at least the following:

• What justifies the introduction of the word "power" in these definitions?
• How or why is it that this ascription of power gets personified in the person who possesses it? To be specific, how is it that a person endowed with authority is defined as being an authority?
• How is it that a collective, such as "the authorities" has come to mean something in a way that the collective "the gods" meant something in ancient pagan cultures? What is there in human psychology that promotes such sweeping characterizations?
• What relationship does all of this have in the promotion of a governmental structure of bureaucratic departments, all of whom seem to corner the market (so to speak) in their separate fields of authority?
• How is it that we have become so complacent about these and related issues that it has become possible for a segment of the political structure to weaponize these "authorities" for their partisan interests - elevating them to unchallengeable status when it suits these partisan interests and demonizing them when it does not? What role, if any, remains for reasonable people to question or challenge "authorities" without inviting condemnation and without resorting to mobocracy to "take them (i.e., authorities who don't follow the program) down?"
• How is it that we have yet to grasp the psychological and sociological subtleties of the divinization of such authorities? (In a Church context we get the phenomenon of "clericalism". In a secular governmental context we get the phenomenon of a nation of sheep.)

In short, are we aware that our governmental structure has taken the form of a priestly class in a new secular religion, and in such a way that it has, throughout its formative history, accompanied the idealization of the traditional religious hierarchy until it has finally emerged as the final arbiter of what is just and true?