Politički autoritet u digitalnoj demokraciji
Authors:   , Marković Jurica 
Published: January 2023

In the beginning of this doctoral thesis, I will discuss the difference in meaning of authority and political authority. For that purpose, I will use Platonʼs Crito, debate between Huemer and Layman, as well as works of Renaut, Arendt and Weber. The semantic difference between terms of authority, power and political authority has its roots, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, in ancient Rome. The concept of authority among the Romans was strongly connected to the concepts of religion, tradition and politics. The term authority comes from the Latin auctoritas which means ʻbinding to the foundationʼ and is opposite from power (lat. potestas). In Rome, the source of power is positioned in the Senate, and the senators present themselves as reincarnations of the founders of Rome. Also, Senators can interpret the Roman constitution as the founders of Rome would have done it back then. Furthermore, Arendt points out that auctoritas comes from the Latin verb augere, which means ʻto increaseʼ, because it was the responsibility of the senators to increase the foundations of authority. The concept of authority, as Romans knew it, was incorporated into a political institution, the Roman Senate. There was a saying – potestas in populo, auctoritas in senatu sit, which means that, while power resides within the people, Senate has all the authority. Romans separated authority from power, which leads to the conclusion that those two terms were established as opposite concepts. Namely, authority has its roots in the past and power in the present. Religion also played an important role in ancient Rome and it was the connective tissue between power and authority. The term religion comes from the Latin re-ligare, which means ʻbindingʼ (to the foundation). Politics, religion and tradition, as Arendt suggests, were closely intertwined in ancient Rome. After beforementioned analysis, I will present definitions of power, authority and political authority. Political authority, therefore, means having the legitimacy of making a decision which the majority of citizens obey. Power is the very act of making and implementing a decision that affects the lives of people in a particular state. Political authority and power are different concepts, and they also differ with regard to the concept of authority. Authority does not only represent an influence on someone, but based on the concept of auctoritas, the very foundation of political authority. Conceptually, it comes before political authority and before power, and its origins are derived from the Romans. The Greeks did not have anything similar to Roman notion of auctoritas and that can be partly confirmed with analysis of Aristotleʼs Politics. Aristotleʼs notion of authority in Politics is similar to three terms in Greek – archē, kurios and crisis. However, that is nowhere near the meaning Romans produced and because of that we can only talk about reconstruction of the similar concept within Aristotleʼs Politics. Reconstruction can be done in three directions: authority as protection from evil people, authority as an improver and promoter of interactions in society and authority as a result of common interest. At this point of discussion, we might ask ourselves why is it that the concept of authority is so important. In order to get an answer to that question, it will be researched what happens to authority when it is inverted and what consequences this inversion carries with it. For that purpose, thoughts of Hannah Arendt on totalitarian government will be consulted. Arendt points out that one of the symptoms of totalitarianism indicates the absence of hierarchy. The lack of hierarchy creates an impersonal system where disrespect for the law is the modus operandi. Arendt claims that authority cannot function within totalitarianism because there is no hierarchy as a prerequisite, there is no structure, there is just lack of real power and general weakness of the Government. Moreover, Selak Raspudić, a Croatian philosopher, will add to this topic that totalitarianism implies the rule of disorder, a world in which authority is invisible, which inevitably leads to self-destruction of man. The rest of the symptoms of totalitarianism include: the absence of hierarchy, cruel formlessness, disrespect for the law and the accumulation of official apparatus. However, these are not the worst consequences, as the cruelest manifestations of totalitarian regimes are concentration camps. Arendt will conclude that those camps are the true central institutions of totalitarian organizational power. All of these symptoms are the direct result of inversion of authority which clearly indicates the importance of its existence in society. That is why it is interesting to notice how Max Weber and Arendt somehow direct the discussion about authority towards the framework of democracy. In order to better understand how authority acts within democracy, Alain Renaut introduces the authority of the Ancients and the authority of the Moderns. He argues that at one point in history the authority of the Ancients was replaced by a new, modern authority. Wilhelm von Humboldt was among the first philosophers who pointed out this phenomenon by dividing states on the Ancient and Modern ones. Ancient states were most concerned about the overall development and upbringing of a human being in accordance with virtue ethics, while modern states, writes Humboldt, paid most attention to prosperity and productivity. The main question facing the Moderns became how to increase the power that has weakened itself by setting limits in order to establish the foundation of power. Modern government guarantees freedom to people who can use it not only to question it but also to destroy it. According to Renaut, this is the principle of modern-day democracy that is constantly subjected to judgment, change or even overthrowing the elected Government. How did this happen? The people (Greek demos) became the successor of the Roman auctoritas. The foundation of authority positioned itself in demos, and apart from the substantial positional shift of authority, demos is in a constant pursuit to increase its authority based on the Roman principle. On the other hand, elected officials are initially limited in exercise of their power, which makes them unable to do their task properly. Also, elected officials have the power to make decisions, but they cannot increase authority as it is positioned in the demos and not in the Government (which would be the senators in ancient Rome). With regard to the described, the situation of modern authority could be characterized as a state of crisis, namely, as a crisis of modern authority. Arendt agrees that the traditional form of authority has experienced a breakdown and believes that authority can best be rehabilitated through revolution, highlighting the example of the American Revolution. However, a careful study of her thought leads to the conclusion that she too could agree that modern authority is in crisis. Democracy seems to be a system that simultaneously enables the emergence of authority and its crisis. We will try to answer why this is so in the next chapter, where we will try to find the essence of democracy and what this term represents. The research quest will begin with Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Thomas Aquinas. For Plato, democracy represents wrong form of organization of the state. Other wrong forms include timocracy, oligarchy and tyranny. Plato points out that democratic rule arises as a result of the degradation of oligarchy. Plato was followed by Aristotle, who believed, in regards of the exercise of power, that power can be exercised by one person, a group of people or a multitude. With this in mind, Aristotle distinguishes between the correct and incorrect types of government. The right types of government strive to work for the common good and they are kingdom, aristocracy and constitutional government, while their opposites are tyranny, oligarchy and democracy. Cicero has a significant impact in the beginnings of the concept of democracy. In Ciceroʼs work De re publica, Scipio Africanus states that the state (Latin res publica) is a matter of the people. Scipio adds that if the nation wants to survive, it must necessarily adopt some kind of decision-making process. Decision-making in the state could be managed by one, a few or many. Although he admits that in case of necessity he would give primacy to the royal government, Scipio claims that the best type of decision-making is composed of all three decision-making types. Additionally, in this context it should be mentioned that democracy represents an incorrect type of government for Thomas Aquinas as well. Philosophers of the Antiquity and the Middle Ages are responsible for establishing the beginnings of the framework of democracy. In the works of Aristotle, Plato, Cicero and Thomas Aquinas, two key features of democracy are clearly outlined – freedom and equality. Although the ideas of equality and freedom in the context of democracy appeared in the Classical period, there were no thinkers who would recognize the people as an essential and unavoidable component in the exercise of power until the Early Modern period. This changed with Machiavelliʼs Il Principe where he tried to somewhat persuade Lorenzo Medici of the importance of winning the people over in the exercise of power. By carefully reading Il Principe, it can be established that Machiavelli tried to direct Medici with recommendations to exercise power with the support of the people, or to rule in popular-democratic direction, so to speak. A few centuries later, Rousseau praises Machiavelli for skillfully serving Il Principe to rulers presenting it as an aid to their rule, when in fact it was a first book of the Republicans. Machiavelliʼs Il Principe for the first time puts the people in a more equal position with the ruler, a position with more respect and recognition. Centuries later, from the idea of more equality between the people and the ruler emerged the concept of republicanism from Rousseau. Rousseau placed equality within the framework of law and considered it to be the crucial element in governing the state. Rousseauʼs contemporary, Montesquieu, pointed out that in a republic, the sovereign power rests with the people as a whole and it is mediated by democracy. For Montesquieu, democracy represents a subtype of republicanism. He also argues that there are two basic laws in democracy. The first one regulates how ballots are submitted, and the other basic law of democracy is that the people should make laws by themselves. In the context of the idea of equality with a focus on laws, Kant is also one of the philosophers worth the mention. His doctrine of the state is based on law, but even more importantly, on eternal peace. For Kant, the equality of all citizens with subordination to legislation is one of the fundamental principles of the republican constitution whose ultimate purpose is to achieve eternal peace. The equality of all citizens is most important in Kantʼs philosophy, which is slightly opposed to Tocqueville who emphasizes the equality of conditions that helps shape the laws in a state, sets maxims for the holders of power to follow and at the same time creates favorable habits of citizens resulting in positive public opinion. Tocqueville went on the study visit to USA where he found a lot of positive elements in its democratic system. When he will emphasize the positive elements of American democracy, he will mention that the reasons for greatness of the American people derive from its laws and customs. Along with the universal right to vote, Tocqueville singles out the jury system as a powerful tool that Americans use to establish democracy. Machiavelli, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Kant and Tocqueville made contributions to the idea of equality that eventually ended up as a significant element of modern-day democracy. One of the ideas that also made impact on democracy as we know it today is the idea of liberty. English philosopher John Locke is largely responsible for paving the way for this idea. Locke argues that a human being possesses liberty on the basis of which he can decide to unite with other free people and set up the first Government. This idea created what we now know as liberalism and in its first years of existence it was used as an argument opposing absolutism. In this line of thought, just many centuries later, the modern thinker John Rawls appeared. Key question which concerns him is how is it possible that over time there exists a fair and stable society of free and equal citizens who remain deeply divided by reasonable religious, philosophical and moral doctrines. This question also shows how liberalism evolved from Locke to Rawls. In the discussion about the modern intellectual contribution to liberalism, another important thinker is mentioned in this doctoral thesis, a man who also undoubtedly left a great mark in this context – Isaiah Berlin. Berlin argues that there are two concepts of liberty, namely negative and positive one. Berlin proposes the thesis that the negative concept of liberty is to be free from and consists in ensuring protection from the interference of others in private affairs. Positive freedom, on the other hand, represents freedom to decide for something. Berlin, therefore, believed that political liberty represents the domain of action without interfering from others, that is, if someone prevents one from doing what he wants, then he is not free. The third idea that shaped democracy as we know it today is that of economic production that shapes the political superstructure of the world. Origin of the idea can be traced back to Karl Marx. Accordingly, Abensour claims that it would be wrong to conceptually limit oneself in the study of Marx and consider only his thoughts on the bourgeoisie, the family or civil society, because by doing so one would ignore his effort to find the root which would be authentically political subject in whose place lies demos. According to Abensour, the center of all meaning of the state for Marx is located in the demos. He also points out that the concept of a democratic state is an illusion, and the fullness of democracy is achieved in its establishment against the state. In the Communist Manifesto Marx presents the idea that the structure of society is based on economic production which constitutes political and intellectual history of each historical epoch. History, according to Marx, is nothing but the history of the class struggle between those who exploit, i.e., the bourgeoisie, and those who are exploited, i.e., proletariat. Marx thinks that the proletariat should overthrow the bourgeoisie from power and win the battle of democracy which would essentially mean to centralize production in the hands of the state. In doing so, favourable conditions for communism would be established and that would mean the abolition of private property. Furthermore, according to Marx, the communists are the most advanced and the most resolute section of the proletariat and based on this, they have the ability to place political power in the hands of the proletariat who would go on to work for the interests of the majority. Marxʼs theory of economic production also means harsh criticism of liberalism as liberalism favours right to own and protect private property. Years after Marx, one who would agree with him on certain points would be Jacques Rancière. Rancière thinks that we as a society do not live in a democracy but in states that have oligarchic laws. The hatred, instead of being directed at the oligarchic system that stands masked behind democracy, turns to democracy as a concept. Hatred, however, can only be used to support an oligarchic system, and in that case, democracy serves as a great tool. Democracy can take a large amount of criticism without offering a solution because the democratic paradox is impossible to solve. To sum up the research about democracy, modern perspectives of democracy are also considered. There will be analysis of Aron on democracy and totalitarianism, Lijphartʼs thoughts on concept of consociational democracy, Dahlʼs perspective that could be considered as a political science aspect on democracy and deliberative perspective of Habermas. However, after an extensive analysis of the concept of democracy and an attempt to penetrate into its essence, no answer was obtained on how to solve the crisis of modern authority. For this reason, in the continuation of the paper, the concept of technology paired with democracy is considered as a possible solution. Heidegger points out that the essence of technology has two meanings. Technology threatens manʼs relationship with the essence of truth, and at the same time directs man to stand next to that essence of truth. It seems that Heideggerʼs statement leads to the conclusion that the use of technology has a dual character. Namely, technology can be dangerous and that must never be forgotten, but at the same time it can enable many things that have a positive effect on the human race. Following Heidegger, Stieglerʼs definition of technology is also analysed in the doctoral thesis. According to Stiegler, technology is the skill by which a certain material is transformed into a product. With this in mind, one can rightfully ask the question: Does the technology serve humanity or does it serve tekhne itself? Stiegler claims that there is a historical dichotomy between the evolution of man and tool (or tekhne which is the root of technology), and in his thoughts he goes so far as to state that the Greek polis also arose because of the tekhne. Stiegler then goes on to criticize Heidegger, considering that his thought about technology was carried out through an instrument that had already been instrumentalized. In other words, man is already thrown into the world of pre-existing technology through which he himself exists and confirms this by using tools, and Heidegger failed to see this. Basically, Stieglerʼs criticism of Heidegger boils down to the fact that Heidegger already thinks of technology through the technological. In addition, Stieglerʼs criticism of Heidegger more clearly demonstrated his thought on the co-constitutional relationship between logos and tekhne. At this point, we might rightfully ask what is the connection between technology and democracy. The answer to that question is that in the merge of technology and democracy digital democracy arises. Digital democracy represents a technical innovation that combines aspects of direct and representative democracy. First of all, it means digital platform, software tool, that aims to allow its users to express their opinion in order to make a final decision for the benefit of the community. Expressing opinion or voting stands out as the most important element of digital democracy. Voting takes place via digital platform and must be safe, transparent and anonymous. Technology that is considered as a possible provider of these values is blockchain. Blockchain represents a distributed and decentralized peer-to-peer network of computers that enables direct data transactions between nodes within the system, thus eliminating the need for mediation and a third party. The system remembers all data transactions and stores them in a distributed ledger. Transactions are stored in blocks that stack on top of each other in a chain form, hence the name block-chain. This technology aims to build and preserve trust and integrity in the system which is achieved through two components: hash technology and cryptographic technology. For the blockchain technology to be considered as the technical backbone of digital democracy, it must enable voting to be carried out safely, anonymously and transparently. After a detailed analysis of its comparative advantages and technical and nontechnical limitations, it is determined that it has the technical capacity to be used as the backbone of digital democracy. However, there is also a possibility that the blockchain will take place of authority in digital democracy. In that case, foundation of political authority is not drawn from the people but from technology. Man is given the possibility to shift the responsibility of decision-making and social action from himself to technology, and if this possibility is accepted, then man dislocates himself from the position of a political subject. The only obstacle in positioning as a political subject is man himself. Blockchain belongs to the probabilistic technology and works on a principle designed by man. In order for the people to truly manifest their freedom and for the crisis of modern authority to be solved, it is necessary to focus on the relationship between man and technology. In this relationship, if a person refuses to become an object of technology, namely tekhne, this person re-establishes itself as a political subject. Hence, the foundation of authority in digital democracy is created in beforementioned relationship between man and technology. One of the most important elements of beforementioned relationship is how technology will be used. What is meant by that? Blockchain as the technical backbone of digital democracy is part of a long and well-known diachronic process of human adaptation to the world around them. The emergence of new technical discoveries represents a challenge that requires adaptation anew, and one of the ways of adaptation is the distinction between good and bad use of technology. In this context, good use implies the use of technology as a tool that achieves efficiency in solving certain problems. It means that technology does not assume primacy in the relationship between man and technology, but represents an equal member of the co-constitutional equation. Bad use, on the other hand, would indicate the predominance in the human-technology equation on the side of the technological, which implies that technology takes primacy in decision-making, and man absolves himself of this responsibility by transferring it to a tool. In order to use the technology well, one of the proposed options is to start with how-to education from young age in the school system. In this case the process of epiphylogenesis, that is, learning mediated by technology, is very important. The goal of epiphylogenesis is to ensure that the memories of our ancestors are not lost and forgotten, but embedded in technology. If we translate Stieglerʼs thought into the context of this work, the crisis of modern authority can be resolved in the relationship between man and technology. The point is to maintain the balance of the relationship, whereby there must be no predominance on the side of technology. According to Stieglerʼs philosophy, authority in digital democracy does not require return to the political, since the political and the technical are one. However, the place of political authority can very easily be taken over by technology, which would lead to an even greater default of modern authority, whereby its crisis would not be resolved. By conducting epiphylogenetic education on the responsible use of technology, it is possible to promote the establishment of balance in the relationship between man and technology, thereby enhancing the path of liberation and not the path of default. However, the path of education about responsible use is not at all easy to reach and depends as much on systematic as on individual efforts. According to Selak Raspudić on this matter, the epiphylogenetic process is increasingly difficult to maintain because modern technology causes a loss of memory, which is crucial for man to be reminded of his role in relation to technology. One of the consequences of aforementioned issue is that technology has enabled man to escape from himself. Such modern man is constantly a subject to a fast-paced lifestyle and is looking forward to new adventures that he will be able to share on social networks. Taking into account all of the above, a solution to the crisis of modern authority can be found in the relationship between man and technology. Reaching this solution would also mean the decentralisation of authority and more authentic version of democracy, but reaching this point is by no means one-dimensional process. That conclusion can be partly confirmed through Berardiʼs work as he mainly criticizes modern technology in conjunction with politics and economics. Berardi reaches the conclusion that politics is technical in its core, what he considers to be a negative trait and in further research he turns to economics, wondering if politics is turned towards itself and if it became technical, can economics be the science that will save the system. Berardi points out that the economy has become a hyper-reality, an artificial world that has lost touch with the real conditions of production. He explains that with the digitization of production, capital becomes more abstract which makes it more obscure and with that it reinforces hermeticity and alienation from the real world. In the conclusion of the thesis, relationship between man and technology represents key component for solving the crisis of modern authority. Technology offers great number of options in digital democracy, and as long as individual treats and uses technology as a tool, a person will establish itself as a relevant political subject. Namely, through epiphylogenetic learning about the responsible use of technology, man positions himself in relation to technology as a political subject who does not give technology the place of authority. By maintaining balance in beforementioned relationship, man will have a chance to realize that it is his responsibility to be an active individual in the society, what will turn democracy into more authentic system and authority will become more decentralised.