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5 Legitimate authority The criterion of legitimate authority has become the most neglected of all the criteria that have been traditionally employed in the moral assessment of war. Nowhere is this more evident than in the popular assessment of contemporary terrorism. For many the central moral issue raised by terrorism is that of non-Âcombatant immunity. The peculiar moral vulnerability of terrorism is seen to lie in its tendency to violate this principle of just conduct. As one study of terrorism argues: ‘Perhaps the main obstacle to any agreement that
: Thow hast the so wel born In lokynge of myn olde bok totorn, Of which Macrobye roughte nat a lyte, That sumdel of thy labour wolde I quyte. 1 Scipio Africanus has apparently kept an eye on his reputation in the centuries following his death, for what we have here is an ancient Roman authority telling a late medieval English poet that Macrobius, the late antique commentator, thought his book was something special. Africanus overreaches a bit to claim the
8 Authority and governance We must go out and conquer the world without being afraid of the difficulties or snares it sets in our way. There must be nothing petty about a Sister of Notre Dame. She must have the strong heart of a man, and a generous soul filled with the spirit of the good God.1 This directive found in the Book of the Instructions of Blessed Mère Julie (1909) was uncompromising. The founder Julie Billiart warned of impending struggles defeated only by the sister of Notre Dame’s ‘strong heart of a man’ and her soul filled with the ‘spirit of the
Chap 3 19/6/06 9:46 am Page 53 3 Challenges to authority: the development of Protestantism in Nantes, 1558–72 ‘The faith of the people of Brittany has always been so constant and pure that the heresy of the last century, so widespread in all the provinces of the kingdom, was not able to penetrate this one.’1 Antoine Boschet’s seventeenthcentury life of the Jesuit missionary Julien Maunoir echoed the popular belief then current in Brittany that the province was little affected by the Calvinism which emerged in France after 1550. But the reality was different
6 Chaucer and hagiographic authority Jennifer L. Sisk While much has been written about Chaucer’s debt to French, Italian and Classical literature,1 comparatively little attention has been devoted to Chaucer’s engagement with hagiography, even though writing about the saints was the most popular and widespread medieval narrative tradition.2 Chaucer’s own legend of St Cecilia is generally regarded as the first (or most) literary example of vernacular hagiography produced in late medieval England, but his engagement with the tradition goes far beyond the
With the Iraqi Interim Authority concept abandoned, Bush and Rumsfeld allowed the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to become an instrument of occupation. The CPA was characterized by confusion over objectives and organization of a kind that Rumsfeld usually found intolerable. It had an ambiguous mandate, an odd relationship with the military, and multiple lines of reporting back
Agency and authority: the politics of co-collecting Sean Mallon There is a seashell in the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) that was collected on one of the coral atolls of Tokelau in the 1990s and gifted to the museum in 2006 by a Tokelauan man called Kupa Kupa.1 We do not have a collection of unmodified seashells in the Pacific Cultures storeroom in the museum. We have shell cultural valuables, shell necklaces, shell trumpets, shell decorated shields and canoes, but no seashell collection. Yet this shell is one of our most interesting cultural
6 Symbolic authority and kinship We have seen that the primary political act of the sovereign is to define who is friend and who is enemy; who is protected as part of the community and who is excluded or banished. This suggests that an understanding of kinship is also essential to any analysis of sovereignty. Understood from this perspective, the sovereign is a symbolic authority organising, regulating and policing the activities of those who live within a territory. The fact that the sovereign traditionally has his analogue in the despot (despotēs in Greek) or
However, recent scholarship has argued convincingly for a re-evaluation of the authority that can be derived from the knowledge of experience and therefore the kinds of people who can be considered ‘scientists’. 2 An inclusive model of knowledge-making is borne out by the evidence that follows. As this chapter will show, eighteenth-century knowledge-makers of a variety of stripes communicated a
enquiries were underway, ritual, grand spectacle and the creation of a false omnipotence were judged crucial to the maintenance of imperial authority in the short term. As far as civilian officials were concerned, the process of collecting information about Africa meant that imperial authority increasingly rested on real power, rather than symbolic power. This underpinned the confidence that meant