Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt considers auctoritas a reference to founding acts as the source of political authority in Ancient Rome. She takes foundation to include (as augeĊ suggests), the continuous conservation and increase 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 alternative 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 factor in the relative success of the former and failure of the latter.
Arendt further considers 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" build up or implement the author-founder's vision and design.
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Famous quotes by hannah arendt:
“It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“It is a secret from nobody that the famous random event is most likely to arise from those parts of the world where the old adage ‘There is no alternative to victory’ retains a high degree of plausibility.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“Power corrupts ... when the weak band together in order to ruin the strong, but not before. The will to power ... far from being a characteristic of the strong, is, like envy and greed, among the vices of the weak, and possibly even their most dangerous one.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)