Children Have Rights from Birth

Chapter 10.2: Gandhi, Mussolini, sati, and a better way to categorize authority

10.2
A Taxonomy of Authority

• Coercive and Consensual Authority

• Parental Authority

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In his essay “The Three Types of Legitimate Rule,” originally published in 1922, pioneering German sociologist Max Weber posited three categories of authority: traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal. Traditional authority is based in customs and practices inherited from time immemorial. Charismatic authority is based in qualities held by the leader himself: courage, competence, charm, wisdom, the ability to inspire. Rational-legal authority is grounded in and derives its presumed legitimacy from a system of rationally derived and formally codified rules.

Each of these is aptly named and describes a real phenomenon. However, for a few reasons, they may not quite serve our purposes as general, top-level categories of authority.

They do not cover all the bases.

Totalitarian communism and similar statist phenomena of the twentieth century certainly were not based on tradition. Quite the contrary—they overthrew tradition wherever they could. They sometimes had charismatic leaders, but their authority was not based solely in those leaders—they also had economic, social, and political philosophies and a complex apparatus for implementing those philosophies in a national political context. They established rules and bureaucracies to implement them, and maintained compliance using fear and oppression.

These methods may have been “legal” in the sense that they had the force of law, but few people with any reverence for human freedom and flourishing would call them “rational.” Above all, totalitarianism is coercive. Their rule was not legitimate, but they ruled nonetheless.¹

Different examples within the same category may have very different characters—sufficiently different as to warrant separate treatment.

People in India once practiced the custom of sati, in which a widow immolated herself on her husband’s funeral pyre (or committed suicide in some other way shortly after the funeral). In many cases, this was done “voluntarily” (the woman of course knowing what social consequences awaited her if she failed to comply with the tradition).

However, they were also plenty of cases where the widow was physically forced to comply. Pyre areas were intentionally constructed to prevent her from escaping once the heat of the flames made her think better of her “choice.” Her legs might be tied to a post or she might be repeatedly pushed back into the pyre pit by men with long poles standing on hand to enforce this tradition. These women may have been culturally conditioned to accept sati, but if it had been a purely benign tradition, it would not have required forcible compulsion.