The struggle for authority : surveying the genesis, function and maintenance of authority with particular reference to the Hegelian theory of authority

Abstract

This dissertation attempts to address the problems which individuals and critical thinkers alike face when they come to address the notion of Authority. In order to clarify the murky waters churning around the question of Authority, this dissertation carefully starts off by tracing the origins of Authority through a reading of Kojève‘s The Notion of Authority where we shall be focusing primarily on the Hegelian theory of Authority through a Kojèvian analysis of the Master-Slave dialectic found in the 'Independence and Dependence of Self-consciousness: Lordship and Bondage‘ section of Hegel‘s Phenomenology of Spirit which we shall be exploring in the first chapter. After analysing the Hegelian theory of Authority, we shall move on to analyse how the Sovereign instrumentalizes and technologizes individuals into his subjects through a process of reification. In order to achieve this task, the Sovereign must initially debase the individual‘s qualified form of life into a bare level of life and so in the second chapter a heavy emphasis shall be placed in elucidating and analysing the terms Bios and Zoé and also how the Sovereign manages to technologize his subjects into prosthetics. In order to do so, we shall be drawing on a whole host of thinkers ranging from Agamben, Arendt, Morris, Heidegger and Foucault. After doing so, we shall be moving on to the final chapter of our study where we shall be addressing the many apparatuses which the Sovereign utilizes in order to maintain his Authority and how disciplinary and biopolitical apparatuses vary from one another. Lastly, we shall be collecting our findings in the concluding remarks of this project.