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In government, authority (Latin auctoritas, used in Roman law, as opposed to potestas and imperium), is often used interchangeably with the term "power". However, their meanings differ while "power" refers to the ability to achieve certain ends, "authority" refers to a claim of legitimacy, the justification and right to exercise that power. For example, whilst a mob has the power to punish a criminal, such as through lynching, many people consider only the courts to have the authority to order capital punishment. Since the emergence of the social sciences, authority has been a subject of research in a variety of empirical settings; the family (parental authority), small groups (informal authority of leadership), intermediate organizations, such as schools, churches, armies, industries and bureaucracies (organizational and bureaucratic authorities) and society-wide or inclusive organizations, ranging from the most primitive tribal society to the modern nation-state and intermediate organization (political authority). The jurisdiction of political authority, the location of sovereignty, the balancing of freedom and authority (cf. Cristi, 2005) and the requirements of political obligations have been core questions, for political philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle, to the present. "The phenomenon called authority is at once more ancient and more fundamental than the phenomenon called state; the natural ascendancy of some men over others is the principle of all human organizations and all human advances."
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