Origins of Authority

The legitimacy of authority has rarely rested on force alone. Kingship, priesthood, and divinity have been entangled since the earliest records. These books probe the anthropological and historical roots of that entanglement — and ask what it means for how we understand power today.

The books here approach that entanglement from different angles. Chomsky’s Notes on Anarchism sets the normative frame: authority is not self-legitimating, and the burden of justification falls on those who wield it. Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship grounds that frame in history — showing, through a forensic examination of the Spanish Revolution of 1936, what anarchist self-organisation actually accomplished when given the chance, and how liberal and Stalinist scholarship collaborated, from different directions, in burying the evidence. Together the two essays establish a principle that the rest of the collection keeps finding honoured in the breach: that the myths sustaining authority are not incidental to it but constitutive of it, and that their demolition is a political act. Graeber and Sahlins work anthropologically, drawing on comparative ethnography to argue that kingship is a near-universal structure of the human imagination; Graeber and Wengrow range across archaeology and myth to challenge the assumption that complexity requires hierarchy. Whitmarsh focuses on the ancient Greek and Roman world, recovering a tradition of atheism that has been largely written out of the classical inheritance. Together they raise a question that none fully answers: whether debunking the myths that legitimise authority is itself a form of power, or merely its shadow.