Metrics of sovereignty, including Authority - Matt

Thanks. Okay, so Primavera set that up really nicely, and I will be quite brief. The context of this is that if we think of functional sovereignty as kind of a family resemblance concept, it's hard to define it exactly, but you kind of know it when you see it, and you can name some of the characteristics that it might have, like this sort of whack-a-mole property. It doesn't answer to any higher authority. It doesn't consider itself part of any larger whole.

It might, for example, have an internal justice system. That's something that many sovereigns or functional sovereign-looking things have. It's become clear to me over the past few days that I have a clear favorite example of a sort of a network nation-ish institution, and it is FIFA. I think FIFA is really, really interesting, right? Because it has many of the properties we might like, we should study and pay a little bit of attention to.

It's got an internal justice system. It's a membership organization. There's a huge, you know, everyone hates it, but it's very hard for anyone to shut it down because there's a huge coordination problem of nations leaving it. I should also add that, you know, everyone hating it is... I think you could make an argument that's somewhat affected or something.

I mean, like, at the end of the day, it kind of does a good job. Like, you know, international football is not in as bad of a situation as it could possibly be in. Anyway, there's a lot to say about FIFA. It's interesting. But one of these concepts in the family resemblance, on that family resemblance list, is authority.

So this is a very interesting concept and a very deep concept. And so what I want to do is basically just give a quick framework for thinking about it, which is drawn from another thinker. It's quite a powerful descriptive theory of authority. And I do want to emphasize this is a descriptive theory of authority. This is not saying here's what authority ought to be or here's what it should be.

It's not saying that. It's not that. Okay. So the theory that I'm going to explain comes from the work of a writer named Alexander Kozhev, who was born in Russia around 1900, spent most of his life in France. He, in the 1930s, he taught a seminar on Hegel, which was taken by many of the most famous mid-century French intellectuals, like Lacan and Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, and many people were very influenced by this guy.

He also wrote a lot about politics in the 1940s. He became a very important advisor to the French government and he is kind of one of the men behind the scenes founders of the European Union in a very important sense because he led French policy in the negotiation of the Treaty of Rome and the European Economic Community. He had a vision for transnational organization of Europe that was just extraordinarily influential. So point being, if we're thinking about these kinds of network nations, new kinds of institutions, things like that, this is someone to learn from. He's a very, very smart guy.

What are his intentions? Are his intentions good? I don't know. I'm not speaking that, right? But he's a smart guy with an interesting descriptive theory.

Okay. Here's the theory. So he defines authority in a particular way. The way he, when you start with just the definition, and let's not push back on his definition. This is just how, this is what he means when he says authority.

What he means when he says authority is the effective to affect other people's actions. So, for example, if your will is done by people around you, despite the fact that they don't actually need to carry out your demands or your will, then you have authority. If you need to coerce people to get you to do, to get them to do what you want, then you don't have authority. So this is not coercive. It's basically, it's the ability to inspire essentially voluntary compliance or voluntary carrying out of a will.

Okay. That's what it is. Now, there's four kinds of authority, according to Kozhev. I'll write them here. You have the authority of the leader, the authority of the master, the authority of the father, the authority of the master, the authority of the father, and the authority of the judge.

These are not mutually exclusive. So if we wanted to sort of analyze any particular example of authority, we'll find some hybrid of these things there. The authority, they all sort of correspond to a different, a different, like, perspective on time, okay, so authority of the leader has to do with future, authority of the master has to do with present, authority of the father has to do with past, authority of the judge, eternity, out of time, Authority of the judge, eternity, out of time. Authority of the leader has to do, so another way of thinking about where it derives from, for authority of the leader we have the idea of success, master, risk, father, well, you could say tradition, or actually what Kozhev says is cause. And authority of the judge is sort of morality, divinity justice right and wrong, stuff like that so basically if you have leader authority someone who has leader authority is someone whose projects succeed if you look to someone and it just seems like we all know someone like this, they see the future this person just knows what is around the bend, everything they do turns to gold so So I'm going to follow them.

That's leader authority, right? It also has to do with prediction. If you're good at predicting the future, you get this kind of authority. Master authority has to do with a willingness to take a risk. So what you can think of it in like poker, like someone who is like winning because they are taking a bigger risk.

That's a little bit like master authority. Another way of thinking about it is if you're familiar with the game of chicken, you have two cars driving directly at one another. If, you know, when one of the cars, you know, chickens out and swerves because they don't want to die. Okay, in that scenario, we've established what Kojev takes from Hegel to call a master-slave dialectic. So we've established an authoritative difference there between the person willing to take the bigger risk and the person not willing to take that risk.

The person who basically wants to cling to biological survival. It creates a power difference, an authority difference. That's what master authority is. Father authority is like the authority that derives from, you know, why are we here? Why are we in this room?

How have we come to be, right? What has made everything the way it is, right? There's a certain authoritativeness to that. You don't question the way things are because, you know, your father created you. Our societies created us.

Our traditions created us. Father authority. It's about looking to the past. It's about tradition and that kind of stuff. Judge authority has to do with like a person who has judge authority would be someone who is honest.

Someone who you trust them because they get it right. They think about what is correct. They think about what is true and just and good. and just and good, you know, and it's just, and the people who we look to in that way, we give them, in effect, judge kind of authority. Now, there's all kinds of interesting hybrids between these two things.

So when you start to think about how they combine, you can start to do really interesting analyses on different forms of authority. And I think it's useful to understand this to basically kind of get a better sense of what it is that we are trying to do in spaces like this, and what are we up to. It's very easy. I think this scheme really helps avoid talking past each other. So, for example, when we talk about sort of, like any kind of, like when we think about these sort of future-oriented techno-utopian kinds of projects, okay?

What we're, think about what's going on there. We are really leaning pretty hard into leader authority. We're sort of saying, this is where things are going. I know where things are going. So listen to me, right?

We're forfeiting father authority, right? Because we're saying, oh, the past is wrong. The tradition is wrong, you know? And you can combine leader authority with, so some examples of hybrid authorities. Barack Obama, a technocrat, technocratic, smart guy, right?

Okay, technocratic leadership is very much leader authority. Barack Obama also like honest, you know, you get this feeling he's trying to do the right thing. He's got leader authority and judge authority. He does not have much father authority or he doesn't have much master authority, right? Fascist leaders, master, father.

That's what they're leaning into. So there's a lot of very interesting, and they all combine in interesting ways. And this is just a very useful scheme to think about what it is we're talking about and what's going on. Thank you.