The Nature and Limits of Authority by Richard T. DeGeorge (review)

17~ BOOK REVIEWS sician, hiding the most important elements of his thought in obscure passages, burying the central concepts of his theory of language, and offering a sly double entendre (l\foDonough's reading of T 7) without giving the reader the slightest clue. But McDonough's account does not persuade; so we are not obligated to make this reassessment. JOHN CHURCHILL Hendrix College Conway, Arkansas The Nature and Limits of Authority. By RIOHARD T. DEGEORGE. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1985. Pp. 305 with index. Richard DeGeorge has produced a very thorough analysis of the nature and limits of authority in general as well as of authority in such specific domains as the family, political society, the labor place, religious bodies, the domain of knowledge in general (epistemic: authority in general), and the university. DeGeorge draws some very useful distinctions among different kinds of authority. His working model is: "someone or something (X) is an authority if he (she, it) stands in relation to someone else (Y) as superior stands to inferior with respect to some realm, field or domain (R) " (14). On his analysis authority is sometimes a power and sometimes a right. He divides authority most basically into executive authority and nonexecutive authority. Executive authority is the right or power of someone to do something in some domain. Nonexecutive authority, on the other hand, concerns knowledge or example. Nonexecutive authority can be epistemic or exemplary (i.e., the authority of one who sets an example to follow, as in art or morality). DeGeorge discusses all of these with patience and clarity. DeGeorge's justification for epistemic authority is that: 1) people are not equal in knowledge (or competence), and 2) the reliance on epistemic authority allows many more people to benefit from some people's knowledge than just those who directly know (38). There are criteria by which rational acceptance of epistemic authority can be distinguished from irrational acceptance. For example, Y must have good reason for believing that X has knowledge in the relevant domain. DeGeorge takes seriously the challenge of anarchism, discussing in some detail arguments by Bakunin, Marx, and Robert Paul Wolff as examples. DeGeorge defines various types of freedom and concludes that, pace the anarchists, the exercises of various kinds of authority, and, in particular, BOOK REVIEWS 173 of political authority, can enhance, rather than limit, free choice and "teleological freedom" (i.e., the ability of persons to conceive of and to attain their goals). Thus he justifies political authority, not on the basis of consent, but on the basis of its necessity in order to preserve and increase effective teleological freedom. Consent is not the foundation for political authority's legitimacy, but, if I understand DeGeorge correctly, a necessary condition of its legitimacy. DeGeorge argues that there is no such thing as executive moral authority. That is, there is no one who makes something morally right simply by commanding it. In another chapter he distinguishes among various kind of religious authority: delegated divine authority (e.g., to preserve revealed truths handed down), operative authority within the church organization (i.e., authority to represent or act for the church body, and religious epistemic authority. In a very enlightening chapter on university and authority, DeGeorge defends the value, both intrinsic and instrumental to all of society, of what he calls the objective-knowledge university. " The objective-knowledge university has as its primary end the traditional trio of discovering, preserving, and transmitting objective, systematic, and unified knowledge " (251) . DeGeorge often takes a very non-dialectical approach, which sometimes inadvertently hides how controversial some of the issues are and how significant the positions are which he calmly sets out. The book is extremely thorough; it brings analytic clarity to issues on which there has been surprisingly little philosophical work done. It should be consulted by anyone doing philosophical or theological work on any of the several topics that demand clear thinking about the nature of authority. Center for Thomistic Studies University of St. Thomas Houston, Texas PATRICK LEE ...