During the past two decades I have been preoccupied with the difficulty that Western culture has in giving meaning to authority. In a number of studies I explored the different manifestations of this problem in relation to issues such as disputes over child-rearing, scientific advice or who to trust in public life. From these studies I became aware of the absence of a serious account of the cultural devaluation of an idea that once constituted a central category of philosophy, political theory and of my own discipline of sociology. This study attempts to find answers through the sociological investigation of the concept of authority.

During the past five years I have attempted to understand how authority emerged, evolved and changed through different historical periods. This work of historical sociology represents an attempt to mobilise the experience of the past to help explain why authority today has such an elusive quality. The story begins with the Homeric legend and leads up to our present day predicament. Hopefully, through providing a historical context for the constitution of the problem of authority, it will allow twenty-first-century readers to interpret the relation between society and authority in a new way. I believe that history provides a unique vantage point for understanding the different symptoms of the crisis of authority. Studying and maybe diagnosing those symptoms will be the subject of my next book on this area.