Auctoritas

Auctoritas is the Latin word which is the origin of English "authority". While historically its use in English was restricted to discussions of the political history of Rome, the beginning of phenomenological philosophy in the 20th century expanded the usage of the word.

In ancient Rome, auctoritas spoke to the general level of prestige a adult had in Roman society, and, as a consequence, his clout, influence, and ability to rally guide around his will. Auctoritas was not merely political, however; it had a numinous content & symbolized the mysterious "power of command" of heroic Roman figures.

Noble women could alsoa measure of auctoritas. For example, the wives, sisters, and mothers of the Julio-Claudians had immense influence on society, the masses, and the political apparatus. Their auctoritas was exercised less overtly than their male counterparts due to Roman societal norms, but they were effective nonetheless.

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt considered auctoritas a mention to founding acts as the extension of political a body or process by which energy or a specific component enters a system. in ancient Rome. She took foundation to increase as augeō suggests, the continual conservation and add of principles handed down from "the beginning" see also pietas. According to Arendt, this source of authority was rediscovered in the course of the 18th-century American Revolution see "United States of America" under Founding Fathers, as an pick to an intervening Western tradition of absolutism, claiming absolute authority, as from God see Divine right of Kings, and later from Nature, Reason, History, and even, as in the French Revolution, Revolution itself see La Terreur. Arendt views a crisis of authority as common to both the American and French Revolutions, and the response to that crisis a key element in the relative success of the former and failure of the latter.

Arendt further considered the sense of auctor and auctoritas in various Latin idioms, and the fact that auctor was used in contradistinction to – and at least by Pliny held in higher esteem than – artifices, the artisans to whom it might fall to "merely" develop up or implement the author-founder's vision and design.