The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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To allow that such a thing as "spurious authority" is possible is to allow, in effect, that a distinction can and must be made between de facto and de jure authority. And the same is true if one allows that authority can be exceeded or abused.

An authority may be called spurious if the excellence on which it claims to rest or is accepted as resting does not, in fact, exist. Thus, e.g., in the case of "the kind of authority that goes with knowing something," "[s]purious authority will mean . . . an unfounded claim to know," while in the case of the kind of authority that commands obedience (cf. Watt: 73: "the kind of authority that goes with commanding and deciding"), spurious authority will mean "an unfounded claim to the appropriate designation or appointment [sc. to office]."

Cf. Watt: "[W]hen someone is said to have abused or exceeded [her or] his authority, there is an implication that [her or] his authority, in the absence of such excess or abuse, was in some sense rightful"(75).

July 1996

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