At the October 2023 Touchstone conference on “The Crisis of Authority,” Brad Littlejohn lectured on “Rediscovering Political Authority in an Age of Expertise.” A right understanding of political authority must be “rediscovered,” Littlejohn argues, because it has been conflated with epistemic authority — to the detriment of our political and social life. Littlejohn builds a case for the idea that authority makes free action possible, illustrating how that occurs within the forms of political and epistemic authority, properly understood and wisely practiced. Since the early 20th century, political leaders have increasingly relied on a “politics of expertise,” to guide and justify their decisions, but as the authority of “experts” has been splintered and even weaponized against the body politic, this abdicatory approach to leadership has been steadily drained of authority. What is needed now, Littlejohn asserts, is a renewal of authentic political authority, beginning at the grass-roots level of community life.
In his book We Answer to Another: Authority, Office and the Image of God (Pickwick Publications, 2014), David Koyzis situates authority in the context of the idea of office. “An office is a calling, a commission, a task given us in fulfilling our duties before God,” he explains. “What the book argues is that each of us has been given, by God, an office, and inherent in each of our respective offices is some measure of authority. The authority that we experience in the different areas of our life is, therefore, something that we are called to respect when it is properly exercised.” Ken Myers introduces his 2014 conversation with Koyzis with some passages from the work of Lesslie Newbigin and Stanley Hauerwas.
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