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1. What is a relationship of authority?

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4. Such an unequal relationship of compliance is not intelligible either to participants or to observers, "unless they understand the reasons or the rules that go with it" (9).unmigrated-wiki-markup

5. Since "authority, in all its forms, is found only where a number of people are gathered together in some activity which depends upon their several roles," "it is by reference to some \ [such\] activity that every instance of authority may be understood, and, where justification is needed, justified" (105).

6. If each kind of authority did not normally have some kind of justification, it would never be possible to speak of authority's being exceeded or abused.

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8. But at least some rough notion of the proper limits of any kind of authority is part of understanding the reasons or the rules that justify it in the context of the activity or the institution with which the authority is associated.

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9. Even an authority which is justified in principle, however, may be abused or exceeded in fact, with the result that "an authority may hinder the pursuit of the very objectives on which its justification rests" (107).

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11. But it is not appropriate to rail indiscriminately against authority, since it is not only various but also ubiquitous and indispensable to so many human activities that are themselves indispensable.4/17/1
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